Roberto Bolaño's 2666: THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

There's a really neat passage very early on in this first of the five volumes that make up Roberto Bolaño's posthumous doorstop novel, 2666, which has next to nothing to do with the plot or any other developments within the volume or the novel as a whole, but gives an early hint of at least one reason why so many people outright revere Roberto Bolaño as rendered by Natasha Wimmer in English:

The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned around (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.*

This passage is especially exquisite in John Lee's note perfect narration of the audio edition of "The Part About the Critics" -- his onomontopaeic rendering of the (drops) is goddamned art. But more about Lee in a bit.

I have a weird history with 2666. When an American edition was announced back in 2008, I pre-ordered it in a sweaty fever of excitement, ready to see if it would give me the kind of cramp from carrying it around that Infinite Jest did back in my 20s. I reckoned not, since I'd switched from foot-commuting with an overstuffed backpack of books and whatnot (seriously, if EDC was a thing in the 90s, I'd have been its queen. It was ridiculous, the shit I had in my backpack every day) to bike commuting, with the heavy stuff in panniers. But when it arrived, I had gotten distracted by... something. This was before I'd started this blog, before I was on GoodReads; metrics and tracking data not available, so I don't remember what it was that distracted me, but I'm sure it was very shiny.

So I didn't actually pick it up to read until it was kind of too late for me to do so, as in, I didn't start reading it until the chronic pain that has come to warp everything about my entire life started warping my life and making things like holding a giant 900+ page book and turning its pages an exercise in agony (but hey, it could have been worse. I could have waited for the trade paperback. Can't do those even a little bit, trade paperbacks). But the buzz about it was still strong, and the first section, "The Part About the Critics", had such a strong whiff of my very favorite book, probably of all time, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (the first ebook I ever bought despite owning a first edition hardcover, because I wanted to spare further wear and tear on that hardcover more than I wanted not to spend ten bucks on a book I already owned) that I gritted my teeth and soldiered on for a while, but found myself interspersing this painful-but-fascinating experience with other books as has always been my bad habit, but soon I was finishing whole other novels in between bouts with the behemoth, and then whole series of novels, and then...

I know I eventually read the whole thing, but it was a horrible slog, and not necessarily because of anything inherent to the novel itself. I didn't remember things, didn't want to page physically back to find what I was missing, and eventually that kind of thing spoiled my enjoyment almost as much as the screeching pain in my hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders etc. did.

Fast foward many years. It's 2021. I'm watching the 2 Month Review podcast while enjoying the hell out of Vernon Subutex, and one of the guests is professional translator Katie Whittimore, who at that time was, I think, just wrapping up her translation of the Bolaño-esque Last Words on Earth, and I thought, hey, it's high time I gave 2666 another try. And I had an Audible credit burning in my pocket. And I figured, what the hell.

Then the kids at 2 Month Review decided that 2666 was going to be the next big honkin' book they tackle, and books like this are always fun to read with pals, so here I am, giving it another go and this time I'm loving it entirely. Amazing what a lack of physical discomfort can do. Plus, the thought of having other people to talk to about it (which was lacking in my 2008-or-so life). Anyway, the gang's first episode of their season devoted to 2666 dropped this week (and Katie is a full-time co-host for it!). Give it a watch or a listen. The discussion went to some very weird places.

But so, "The Part About the Critics", which is the first of the five "books" that comprise 2666. Ahem.

As I mentioned, this first part gives strong Foucault's Pendulum vibes, in that it chiefly concerns a circle of four literary academics/critics who are all obsessed with the output and career of a mysterious German author (with an Italianate surname), Benno von Archimboldi. We have the Frenchman, Jean-Claude Pelletier, the Spaniard Manuel Espinoza, the Englishwoman (and only woman in the club) Liz Norton, and the Italian Piero Morini (I think I wrote a novel like this when I was 11. I remember bugging my mom to come up with good names for a Frenchman and a Spaniard and an Italian and a German, but they were traveling by ship and about to encounter pirates). They hop from conference to conference all over Europe in that enviable-seeming way that European intellectuals seem always to be doing, become, essentially, the Mean Group of German Literature (but of course don't see themselves that way), get overly entangled (sometimes literally) in each other's lives while still actually hardly knowing each other outside the sphere of their mutal obsession (while thinking they know each other very well indeed and not just because both Pelletier and Espinoza wind up having overlapping love affairs with Norton), and go on odd little side quests trying to learn more about their famously reclusive and mysterious literary hero.

There is a famous passage in the first half of this volume, in which a story-within-a-story (within a story) that is sort of kind of about Archimboldi but is really mostly about a Frisian woman's adventures in 1920s Argentina. It is all told in one extraordinarily run-on sentence that takes up almost six pages in my first edition hardcover. Everybody talks about it; it's a pretty wild thing and quite a shaggy dog story that really kind of thematically prefigures a decent amount of what's to come in 2666. It is, however, a whole 'nother degree of remarkable in the audio book edition, and not just because it takes up a full 15 minutes of narration at regular speed. Once again, John Lee is perfection in rendering it, but here he benefits from the hand of an unknown production lackey whose job it was to edit out the inevitable flubs and coughs and misreadings that are part of every audio book narrator's raw performed recording, because that person (or people) also has to edit out any breath sounds. Which is something nobody ever notices or remarks on in ordinary audio books, of course, but in the Blackstone Audio/John Lee English language edition of 2666 this passage reaches new heights of sheer uncanniness, for while Lee of course pauses very briefly between clauses, there is nary a breath sound or even enough of a pause for a breath to be taken for the whole 15 minutes.

I know this because I was already deeply interested in how this passage would be handled when I first sat down with this audio book, and then I played it back again many, many times in sheer awe, not so much of the technical achievement or apparent stamina of John Lee so much as the overall over-the-top ridiculousness of the final effect.

I have to wonder, though, if people for whom this audio edition is their first read through of 2666 even notice this bit? Does it even register as a pages-long sentence if prior meta-knowledge hasn't prepared one for such a sentence? Or does it just flit by with the rest of the narration? Let me know in the comments if you are such a one.

Anyway... back to the text.

I'm a very different person in 2021 than I was in 2008-ish. Back then I identified, of course, with Liz, though only sort of in that she's the token girl. I dreamed of someday being something like her, though I never have made it to visit even one bit of Europe, let alone all of them. I've had overlapping lovers who were also friends, etc. etc. I'm a book nerd who's shy on academic credentials (much is made of how Liz is the only one of the Critics who isn't a full professor, hasn't written a dissertation or earned a PhD yet. Eyeroll). I've been the trained attack poodle who eviscerated a verbal opponent on my hind legs whom my peers praised more for doing it at all than for how well I did it. I've definitely had my bona fides to participate in a conversation evaluated on my fuckability instead of my actual qualifications. Etc.

But now I'm partially disabled, and so my focus has shifted irrevocably to Morini, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair (not due to the disease so much as a result of a car accident that took place prior to the events of the novel)  and seems rather an asexual ascetic of a person in contrast to the sexcapades of his friends. My disability antenna vibrate hard in every scene that includes him; I find quickly that he doesn't have an electric wheelchair, for instance -- his friends are often depicted as pushing him around places -- but he gets around almost miraculously well on his own, never encountering accessibility issues and, to my constant awe, never experiencing hand cramps or anything like the agonies I've experienced the few times I've had to use a manual wheelchair.* But presumably 1) His hands and arms are not messed up like mine are and are indoubtedly in better "shape" from doing this activity all the time and 2) Doing it all the time has given him callouses and whatnot that I lack. 

Also, his condition is deteriorating and he is frequently ailing when the other three call him on the phone**, but apart from the perfunctory half-acknowledgment whenever he honestly answers their automatic "how are you"s, the other three aren't terribly interested in how he actually is and rush to dump their latest findings about Archimboldi, literary gossip, and gossip about each other into his increasingly frail lap. Ha and also rumph. And perhaps emblematically and standing in for all three for a moment when it happens, Liz doesn't even see Morini as a man (even as a whole 'nother person, perhaps?) until a hypnagogic episode late in the story has her thinking she saw him standing in a corridor, some distance away from his chair.

Of course, to a degree Morini is partially responsible for this, as when he is temporarily struck blind for a bit but doesn't tell anyone...

He also winds up being left behind when Pelletier, Espinoza and Norton decide to hare off to Mexico to follow up on an account of Archimboldi having surfaced in Mexico City with the intention of proceeding to a fictional town based on Ciudad Juarez, Santa Theresa, on the U.S. border -- where, as Morini discovers in some extracurricular reading, some 100 people have disappeared and been found murdered. The area is home to lots of maquilas (and in the good old 2020s would now, if it actually existed, be a place where a lot of people who came to the U.S. border seeking political asylum get diverted and left in limbo, so it's easy for people to get lost and a prime hunting ground for, that's right, a serial killer. Or maybe more than one? There are over 100 victims).

(A lot more)

Nor is this the only hint of foreboding we get before the Mexico trip. On the ramp-up to this jaunt, we've had some shocking developments, including the appearance of possible additional rivals for Norton's affections in the persons of her brutish ex-husband and of of a much younger secondary school teacher and it is perhaps partly these that trigger a suprising burst of violence on the part of Pelletier and Espinoza, not against the husband or the teacher, but against a cab driver with whom they have what seems like a small disagreement but then it spirals wildly out of control until the cab driver crudely insults Norton. The critics demand he stop the cab, and when he demands payment, Pelletier and Espinoza deliver a playground beatdown that goes way too far. This sours the friends' relationships for quite some time, to the point where later on Morini up and disappears from the hotel they're all staying at for yet another conference, and stays incommunicado for several days and isn't terribly interested in telling everybody how he spent his time.

And then there's one Edwin Johns. On an earlier London trip, the group visited an art gallery whereat this very unusual artist had a show. His art is plenty interesting in its own right, but then the last piece turns out to be arresting as hell, "an ellipsis of self-portraits" containing at its center a mummified human hand. It turns out to be Johns' human hand, the one with which he paints. He cut it off deliberately, took it to a taxidermist to be preserved, and incorporated it into that work. Johns, becomes a secondary object of the Critics' fascination because of course he does (a factor in "The Part About the Critics" is that sooner or later all four of them come to realize that there just isn't enough known about Archimboldi to make him a suitable subject for the kind of all-consuming obsession to which they're all longing to surrender; he's never going to be enough by himself), and so we are treated to a side trip when the three male Critics travel to Switzerland pretty much expressly to meet Johns so they can ask him why he did it. They are not satisfied with his answer "To make money" but in this day and age I think this is a perfectly acceptable one. Artists' works get more valuable after they're dead because then there comes to be a finite number of them; the source is for ever gone. Somebody else makes the millions that their work sells for.

How else can a living artist see that kind of financial windfall? Johns has found a way to shut down his art factory forever (unless he trains himself to paint with his other hand, or his left foot or with a paintbrush in his mouth like several disabled artists do, etc) without having to, you know, die. Except maybe he needed to get a bit more famous first...

Anyway, if you can't tell, I'm as interested in Johns as in Archimboldi, and it's driving me crazy that I can't remember if we get more Johns in 2666 or not. Of course, Liz , who missed the trip to Switzerland to meet the man himself, is unaccountably drawn to another -- or possibly the same? -- exhibit when she returns to London after bailing on Pelletier and Espinoza in Mexico, and learns one last bizarre fact about him but... is there more?

But so, "The Part About the Critics" was not my favorite back in the day, and time has only brought me to dislike the titular critics more (while leaving my love for Casaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo largely intact). I'm ready to move on and spend some time with poor Amalfitano, who is one of the many people the critics have snubbed, taken for granted, and regarded as in every way lesser than, even though he, unlike they, has actually lived a life. And had a wife. And raised a child, as we'll see pretty soon in "The Part About Amalfitano."

Stay tuned, true believers.

*I've only had to do this so far when I'm required to be in constant motion around a large space like when I'm running an event, or when I'm shopping in a large store with brutal concrete floors that doesn't have motorized carts for the handicapped; otherwise I do all right with a cane. So far. Thank goodness for my rheumatologist and my Humira prescription.

**Which they do with incredible frequency. In the days when this was still a land-line-only proposition. Presumably with long distance charges for international calls. Yet blithely they phone around even more profligately than they hop plains to go to symposia or just to visit each other. And not all of them are Baby Boomers so this is all weird and unlrelateable but hey, one of the reasons I read so much is so I can experience as many other lives as possible in the short span of my own. Especially since my physical space is so restricted now.

Manuela Draeger's ELEVEN SOOTY DREAMS (tr by J.T. Mahany)

"If the Party had been warned," Maryama Adougaï ventured, they could have saved us from outside!" "The Party no longer exists," Imayo Özberg remarked... "Maybe it existed in the past, but today it's not even in basement thirty-six, it simply no longer exists."

I've read me a few literary apocalypses in my day, visited me a few dying earths, watched me a few attempts to save our world through various means, but rarely have I felt it as viscerally as I did in the surreal but succinct Eleven Sooty Dreams.

While "Manuela Draeger"* gives us plenty of glimpses of an actual lifeless world of a quality that we might expect of a Stephen Baxter if not a J.G. Ballard (to name two of my favorite literary destroyers of worlds), it's not those images that got me. Sure, they're plenty poignant, but Eleven Sooty Dreams has much worse to offer in its 140 pages. 

Because Eleven Sooty Dreams is, above all else, an experience of genocide, writ small if no less total, in the form of eleven children being burned alive by their people's ethnic and/or political enemies.

Eleven Sooty Dreams offers us this horror in the form of a "post exotic" novel - a sub-genre of literary fiction I'm still wrapping my head around but that here, at least, seems to present itself as a story drawing on the conventions and images of all cultures and none (though I can almost imagine it taking place in the Beszel of China Mieville's The City & The City; especially as I surveyed the wonderful array of just-bizarre-enough proper nouns), so readers everywhere are on precisely the same footing as we explore a culture that is just foreign enough to us to give us the slight distance and breathing room necessary to appreciate the novel as art and as fiction, but still recognizable -- without appropriating the cultural, historical or symbolic baggage of any actual society that has existed in our world, at least not until the very end when some real world nations and historical figures are briefly mentioned.

Eleven children, the latest generation of an ethnic and political minority trapped in an almost completely destroyed city and a world that has been reduced to a series of concentration camps and ravaged ecosystems, have undertaken a daring mission. They sneak into a building under cover of a pride parade, hoping to steal some ammunition that can help their people rise up against oppression this time, instead of just marching with banners and slogans. Alas; another faction is enacting a plot to burn that same building to the ground under cover of that same parade.

This is not a spoiler, by the way; it's the entire premise of the book, spelled out in the jacket copy.

The sooty dreams of the title, then, are those of these children as their consciousness and bodies burn and warp and fuse in a timeless, blazing moment.

But this isn't just 140 pages of describing their agony; rather it explores the memories they all have in common, having grown up together in a semi- communal creche/school under the tutelage of one Granny Holgolde, an elder stateswoman of their movement who has charged herself with inspiring the next generation to cherish and fight for the ideals of a socialist movement understood as the dying remains of the long-lost Second Soviet Union (wherever and whenever that was). That she does so chiefly through stories of a perpetually reincarnated and peripatetic elephant named Marta Ashkarot, in which the humans she meets morph into "strange cormorants" when they die, is the chief source of the novel's surrealism.

Chief, but not only. Remember, these kids' consciousnesses are merging. "My memories are yours," and variations thereon, is an often-repeated refrain as hallucinatory accounts of, say, how the narrators' own parents met and each removed the other's mandatory placard that exhorted perfect strangers to murder these useless ethnic minority scum**, how the elephant named Marta Ashkarot spends some time being human and thinks it's weird to use hands instead of her trunk to manipulate things while she watches the natural world die off, how this one weird old soldier conducted their classes whenever their regular teacher got murdered by the state, how a girl who went out one day to fetch water wound up having a moving colloquy with the corpse of her little brother where it was tangled up in barbed wire...

All in all, quite possibly the strangest and saddest of the many strange and sad things I've read since I reviewed Stevan Allred's The Alehouse at the End of the World for Skiffy and Fanty. Eleven Sooty Dreams feels almost like a companion volume, or even a prequel, to that slab of weird. Which I was not expecting, least of all from a Russo-French author and the good folks at Open Letter Books. You just never know what those kids are going to come out with next.

Don't ever let them go on an ammunition raid.

*A heteronym of Antoine Volodine, about whom more in a future post.

**The narrator's mother's placard, for instance, reads "This woman is still alive. Isn't there something abnormal about this?"

Amor Towles' THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY

Toward the ending of Amor Towles' latest, The Lincoln Highway a character pauses to look at a wall full of photographs, an elegaic moment he commemorates with these thoughts:

...the funny thing about a picuture is that while it knows everything that's happened up until the moment it's been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And irreversible.

Reading historical fiction, of which The Lincoln Highway is almost a platonic ur-example, is a lot like that. The characters and their world are perfectly established within the text and the reader comes to know everything that's happened within it, but after the last page is read, one can't but wonder what happened to them all next. Knowing, as the characters didn't, what history had in store for their world, right up to the present day.

As I started on my way through The Lincoln Highway, I kind of found myself wanting to hate it, but not quite being able to. A weird reading experience, to say the last, but of course it wasn't really the story or the characters I was wanting to hate (with a few unambiguous exceptions), but how history unfolded afterwards, for the better and for the worse -- and how rather more people than I would have originally thought are so upset that the worse happened (even if they themselves came through it just fine) that they'd rather the better hadn't happened either (even if they, too, have benefitted from it).

People read historical fiction for a couple of different reasons. A lot are for a kind of romance; the past becomes an impossible-to-reach kind of place where people dress and talk and eat and act differently and we're delighted to be tourists in that so-different world for a while. We might be encountering historical figures we've come to idolize and get directly to watch them doing the deeds that made them famous. Or we might see them through the eyes of an imaginary ordinary schmoe whose less famous deeds affect or are affected by those of the Great. Or we might enjoy the kind of plots we enjoy from other genres stitched onto historical events, witness the great popularity of things like murder mysteries set in Norman England (see especially Howard of Warwick, who does exactly this and makes them funny to boot), or high fantasy set in sort of France or Byzantium (hello, Guy Gavriel Kay), or that whole wild genre we call Weird Westerns. Or...

Or we might wish to visit the scenes of our own actual sort-of-remembered youths, in which romance threatens to yield to nostalgia. 

We're living through another period in which nostalgia has been weaponized to turn people against one another in the name of making things like they were in the good old days, which only about half of us seem willing to remember that the good old days (in this case, the early 1950s in the United States of America) were only really good for the people on the top of the socio-political heap. Not so great if you were poor, a person of color, disabled, LGBTQ+, neuro-divergent, etc. But look, I get it -- for the people who had it good in the 1950s, there were probably more people who had it better than any other humans in history before or since. There were good union jobs that let a person support a family on just one income. Public education had higher standards and everybody pulled together to see that they at least came close to meeting them. Ladies still wore pretty dresses and men wore suits and stylish hats and cars were big and luxurious and made out of real steel and real leather and stuff was built to last. Yada yada. 

But still, only some people got to enjoy that, and when everybody else started acting like they'd actually bought into that old American chestnut that anybody could have it if they only worked hard and behaved, well, the people on top, instead of trying to find a way to extend that good life to more people, they started squandering the resources that would have been required to achieve that on keeping everybody else down and out by whatever means necessary. And when everybody else wouldn't just meekly say, okay sir, sorry, I'll go back to my hovel and starve now -- things got nasty, and have been getting nastier ever since.

Point being, nostalgia for the 1950s is pretty toxic in this endless plague year of 2020 And Some Months, and if you don't think so, you're probably part of the problem, and I really wish you'd go get vaccinated before you catch this stupid virus and die or give it to someone else and they die. And maybe consider that if you just realize that "Black Lives Matter" doesn't mean that other lives don't, but that people want you to realize that black lives matter, too. In adition to, rather than instead of, as it were.

But I digress.

But so, then, why did I even pick up a historical novel set in the very time and place that all of this weaponized nostalgia points to as those good old days, then? Well, two things: the author and the title.

I really liked Towles' earlier work, A Gentleman in Moscow, I've many friends who've told me that Rules of Civility is every bit as good... and I hear Amor Towles' name mentioned in the same breath as my beloved E.L. Doctorow more and more, it seems. So I'm inclined to have a look at anything else with his name on it that crosses my path. Meanwhile, this new book of his is named for the Lincoln Highway, aka US Highway 30, which passes a mere 20 miles north of the town where I grew up and whose length (disguised most of the way as Interstate 80*) I have traveled from sea to shining sea my own self. Plus, if you're a fan of that great but incomplete old HBO drama, Carnivale, you've spent some time on that good old Lincoln Highway in your imagination already. Not as sexy as Route 66, but a lot more important in that boring, utilitarian, sound and unflashy way -- kind of like the president it was named for.

Plus, as the early course of the plot sets us up to believe, this road trip novel suggests it's going to take us west, right through all of the Wyoming towns in which I've spent most of my life in one way or another -- the trail of postcards left by the first abandoning character (lots of abandoning happens in this book), for instance, includes stops in Cheyenne, Rawlins and Rock Springs on the way to sunny California. So, I mean, of course I was going to read this.

But I had my suspicions. And for a long time, it felt like my suspicions were right. Because even though the young heroes of The Lincoln Highway are down and out at story's beginning -- Emmet Watson was just granted compassionate early release from a reform school after his dad died, leaving no one else to care for Emmet's eight-year-old brother, Billy, and the two young rogues who stowed away on Emmet's ride back to his family's failed Nebraska farm, Duchess and Wooly -- are all able bodied, good-looking, intelligent young white men (and boy) of the type that had to make pretty much a deliberate effort to fail in the USA of the 1950s, even if two of them are semi-orphaned and one is slightly neuro-divergent.

But, thank goodness, as the journey proceeds, we meet some characters with some melanin, but even there it's a tiny bit problematic in that they are Paragons of Respectability By White Standards**. Chief among these is Ulysses, a big burly black man who saves little Billy from an attack, who is not only a war veteran but a man who was happily married with a child on the way until he joined the army to go fight in World War II -- against his wife's wishes. She didn't understand, or didn't care, about the social pressures that came to bear on able-bodied men (even ones with deferred jobs like he had) to not just serve but Serve. When he came home, having survived the war, his family was gone, and he's been searching for them ever since. There is a very touching moment as Billy, during their ripening acquaintance, insists to Ulysses that he must have been named for the Greek hero and not the Civil War general/U.S. President, and that Billy thinks maybe Ulysses is Great Ulysses reborn and is thus destined to regain his family after ten years of wandering (of course this Ulysses has been wandering for just over nine years when we meet him). Ulysses cries and lets himself begin to hope again after Billy tells him the very abridged version of the Odyssey that is in his prized possession, a compendium of heroes real and imaginary, from Achilles to Zorro, with -- and while this book already seems like the most 1950s object ever, it proves to be even more so when the charming detail is shared that there is no entry for the letter Y apart from "You", with blank space for a boy*** to write down his own adventures when he has them someday.

But so, see, this just reeks of little white savior crap, right? And this is never really addressed or redeemed except that it kind of is just by the sheer quality of this goddamned book. The Lincoln Highway is a beautiful read, with wonderful scenes both funny and tragic and poignant and, it's got one more quality that I found way more refreshing than I should have (an indictment more of my general choices as far as what I read than of anything else, I reckon): its primary hero, Emmet, is actually heroic. Not in the sense of saving damsels in distress or foiling deadly plots or capturing bad guys, but in the sense of having a strong moral compass that he actually obeys throughout, a strict code that he actually adheres to, but without a trace of toxic masculinity. He has high standards for himself and his behavior and subjects his decision making to rigorous scrutiny, having learned well by observing the failings of his parents from an early age even before he made the mistake that sent him to reform school far away and then received an even more thorough-going moral instruction that he took to heart BUT GET THIS, he doesn't get judgmental of others who don't live up to his standards. Nor does he lose his temper unless truly extremely and very deliberately provoked. At times he has the impulse to yield to fury for less -- many times, frankly, because while Billy is just precocious and trusting and thus a handful, Duchess and Wooly are, in their different ways, still rogues(though as the story proceeds we kind of see that maybe Emmet has rubbed off on them a little bit), rogues whose very existence throws monkey wrenches into Emmet's and Billy's plans almost before they're laid and whose quirks and caprices keep on creating obstacles to the Watson brothers' progress through the story -- but he checks himself, explains his reasoning, and moves on to solving a problem rather than spending time casting blame or seeking to punish anyone.

I think the last hero like Emmet that I've encountered was maybe Captain John Carter of Mars (and yes, I know, he was a Confederate captain, but that's before he became John Carter of Mars). Kind of refreshing, is what I'm saying.

But see where this is still dangerous? I'm afraid that The Lincoln Highway could be a very dangerous book, with all the charm and musicality of prose of, say, Doctorow's Ragtime but without its notes of social criticism. It's a deeply pleasurable read if you can shut off that little nag of social conscience that I hope most of *my* readers have at any rate.

But maybe I'm the asshole for assuming that it's going to be weaponized? Are the alt-right types even reading contemporary U.S. fiction that isn't being flogged to them on extremist podcasts and OAN? All the places I see reviewing this book so far are outlets that are not beloved of that crowd -- NPR, the New York Times, etc. So maybe I'm worrying about nothing and should just shut up and enjoy the book and let other people enjoy it. BUT, I am extremely online, so I see stuff exactly like this getting corrupted all the time, so yeah, I guess what I've got to do is hope they don't find this. And that Amor Towles isn't one of those guys? Which... he kind of could be? Because I have a feeling all of his fiction is like this, maybe?

Maybe I should just delete this blog post, which got way more political than mine usually do. I guess you should all be glad I don't read a lot of historical fiction set in 20th century America.

Don't worry. I'll be bombarding you with Roberto Bolaño soon.

*Though hey, in Wyoming there are stretches where the Interstate diverges from the old highway because a bunch of landowners strong-armed the government into re-routing it so they, instead of other people, could collect the compensation even though the route they forced the interstate to take was already known to be much less safe, more prone to closures in bad weather, all around just worse, and that stretch of the Interstate is one of the deadliest in the country and I really wonder how many of their fellow human beings' blood is on that compensation money those landowners got... just a few years after the events in this novel, actually...

***And, even more cringe, the closest thing we get to a villain of color is a side character who has light skin and freckles (and this is mentioned more than once to make sure we notice) and can thus be understood as of mixed race and I'm still cringing a little bit at that choice.

***Think many girls were given a book like this back then? My knee-jerk thought is of course not, but come on, the 1950s were no more definable only by the stereotypes about them than our times should be to people in the future, if there are any! Ha ha!

Audr Ava Olafsdottir's BUTTERFLIES IN NOVEMBER (tr. by Brian Fitzgibbon)

 Rarely have I found a protagonist so unrelatable, a plight so enviable, an audio book narrator so unpleasant, but still wanted to finish the whole book because even so I was enjoying the hell out of just the idea of it and curious as to how it would end, even though I already knew that how it would end was in recipes.

(This is not a spoiler because this is announced very early in the text)

Audr Ava Olafsdottir's Butterflies in November made for one of the prickliest audio book experiences I've had to date, for all that I admire the perfect fitness of narrator Angele Masters for portraying the story's narrator-protagonist, an unnamed* youngish woman who embarks on an off-season picaresque along Iceland's ring road with an unlikely companion. 

Unnamed is a professional translator, fluent in 11 languages besides her native Icelandic and is very particular about words and word choices to the exclusion of much else, and so has recently found herself dumped both by her husband of four years (who has just gotten another woman pregnant and has decided he'd rather have a family with her than keep having arguments with Unnamed in which Unnamed quotes entire paragraphs from manuscripts she's working on even though they have little or nothing to do with the point of contention) and her not-terribly-secret lover (who seems to have just found their relationship kind of pointless but keeps showing up in this story anyway for Reasons) in the same day. Which would send your typical chick lit** protagonist into spirals of self-doubt if not outright self-hatred as she tries to figure out what's wrong with her, but Unnamed is not a chick lit protagonist. Whatever she is, it's not that.

Unnamed is no sooner partially settled into a new studio apartment (she still has to shelve her half of the books that are pretty much all she kept from her marriage) than her pregnant best friend has an accident on her new front steps that isn't itself so bad but winds up revealing that her pregnancy is going to be much more complicated than originally thought. The father of her unborn twins no longer on scene and the father of her fascinatingly odd four-year-old son, Tumi long gone, there is no one to care for the boy while Unnamed's friend (who gets a name, and it seems to be the same as the author's: Audr***, but I'm not sure if that's significant) is confined to the hospital until her twins are born. Except, of course, for Unnamed. 

But Unnamed has been telling people that, even though it's November in Iceland, she's planning a road trip to get a fresh start on her new life as a single woman and whatnot. And she's told this to so many people, so many times, that she's convinced herself it's what she actually wants.

Fine, Audr says. Take him with you. He's the easiest kid, he's no trouble at all, he'll teach you something. He'll change you. Audr actually says this, that Tumi will change Unnamed, like that's an end in itself.

Ah, but I mentioned that Tumi is a fascinatingly odd child. He is almost completely deaf and sports a gigantic hearing aid and a speech impediment. His vision isn't so great, either, so he also sports coke bottle glasses. He reads lips pretty well but mostly communicates with people in sign languages. Meaning Unnamed has a chance to add another language to her collection.

I mean, I would say yes, too.

To sweeten the deal, Unnamed manages to win not one but two lotteries right before the pair is to set off. She's won a movable summer bungalow, to be installed at a site of her later choosing, from a private lottery, and she's won a huge cash jackpot in the Icelandic national library -- using numbers that Tumi helped her to choose. She's now one of the richest people in Iceland! But her reaction to these windfalls is mostly to take them in their stride; it now means that she can put a huge stash of cash in her little car's glovebox and not have to worry about any emergency purchases she might have to make on their way. Sleeping bags, warm clothes, goldfish and a bowl... You know, quirky Icelandic things.

And at last they set off, going counter-clockwise and against the natural flow of life and traffic on Iceland's famous ring road (which I just enjoyed a virtual visual trip along in Brendan Walter's enjoyable 2018 film Spell). The relationshp between Unnamed and Tumi becomes a comfortable one as she learns to communicate with him and to meet his small needs, mostly for "Milk" as he frequently demands from strangers they meet along the way. They meet strange men, some of whom Unnamed has sex with. Unnamed muses to herself with astonishing frequency about the inherent failings of womanhood (not a feminist icon in the making, Unnamed). Various animals die. The pair wind up unintentionally semi-stalking a male Estonian choir and their accompanying female stripper, on a performance tour of rural Iceland. Tumi gets lost a lot and inappropriately refers to a few men as Daddy. They are not always the ones Unnamed sleeps with. There's not as much stuff about languages and words as I was led to expect. A lot of weird phrases pop up that I'm not sure originate with Olafsdottir or Fitzgibbon -- stuff like Unnamed noticing amidst a melange of smells the odor of things that have been removed from their customary settings? Angele Masters sounds strident and clipped and exactly how I think Unnamed would sound if she were British, except Unnamed isn't British and while frequently I hear non-British characters narrated by British audio book narrators and it just slips below my consciousness as I listen, with Butterflies in November I can't not notice it and it bugs me but I keep listening long past when I usually stop because the narrator is bugging me.

Did I like the novel? To be honest, good question.

*Why does it seem like half of the novels I've read lately have unnamed protagonists? It makes writing about my reading so unnecessarily awkward.

**Is this still a thing, by the way?

***One obnoxious fact about listening to audio books is that you don't often find out how names are being spelled in the text without consulting dozens of book reviews and promotional sites in the hopes that someone else has shared it, or actually hunting down some direct sample text and guys, just be glad I'm jumping through the painful hoops to produce this text at all.

Meredith Westgate's THE SHIMMERING STATE

 Like Paul Scott's classic Raj Quartet of decades past, this novel ought to have started with a thesis sentence that gave us a bit of a warning what was in store for us, like "This is the story of a rape." In Scott's novel, the actual, physical rape of a young woman is meant to illustrate in microcosm what the British had done to India; in Meredith Westgate's debut novel, The Shimmering State, there may or may not have been an actual physical rape, but there is most certainly a rape of a consciousness. The crime occurs after pages and pages depict a powerful older male film producer type -- the story takes place in a near-future Los Angeles -- taking choice after choice away from a young ballerina, Sophie, who is on the brink of making it big but who is still entirely vulnerable to the machinations of guys like him, who can destroy careers with a word -- or psyches with a dose of a hot new club drug that he's been evangelizing through all those same pages that he's been enjoying Sophie's discomfort at his attentions. The threat has loomed large from the very beginning. He's sure she'll enjoy it. Why does she keep saying no? The pressure that mounts is exquisitely awful; we know he's going to slip her a dose, it's just a question of when...

Whether or not he actually got into her pants after dosing her is therefore a moot point. 

Anyway, The Shimmering State is the story of a rape and what happened afterwards.

It's also the story of a young man, Lucien, who has allowed first his famous artist mother to subsume his identity in the usual way - dominating his life, though in a kindly way, and overshadowing his own artistic efforts to the point that even after her death his work is getting included in shows because he's his mother's son - and then lets his grandmother more literally subsume him when he swipes a couple of her experimental new Alzheimer drugs (the same ones used recreationally by the film producer*), meant to revive her mind with somehow curated versions of her own chemically stored memories.

Lucien, I should be clear, is not the rapist.

Sophie and Lucien, we find, knew each other slightly in the before times -- before Lucien started tripping on his grandmother's memories, and before the producer slipped Sophie a mickey composed of a thrill killer's memories -- before meeting again in a rehabilitiation clinic that treats bad cases by more or less stripping all of their memories and then carefully reintroducing only the ones the patients want or need to keep to be functioning, happy humans again. Despite their erasures, Lucien and Sophie feel drawn to each other and experience what might amount to the body remembering what the mind cannot. 

The story of how each of them wound up at the rehab clinic unfolds gradually, interspersed with servings of that of their progress through this weird therapy and a few episodes from the life of the clinic's head, who experiences a personal tragedy in the middle of it all that seems like it might put her at risk of joining her patients. This therapist, one Dr. Angela Sloan, looms toward the novel's end as a monster potentially worse than any villainous psychiatrist since Ursula LeGuine gave us Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven. Her position doesn't quite give her the power to alter reality itself, but the control her position gives her over the most intimate details of her patients' very memories is terrifying even before she succumbs to the temptation to abuse it when someone very close to her, with whom she has made a myriad of mistakes, comes within that power. Her story thus combines elements of both Lucien's and Sophie's and should, perhaps, have been developed more to become a true third narrative rather than a mere occasional commentary on the other two. It is brought mostly to a satisfactory conclusion within the small space it occupies, at least. This may be Westgate's first novel, but she knows better than to leave plot threads dangling.

More importantly, she also knows the art of sharing intense experiences and hard-hitting emotional truths in truly lovely prose. A natural disaster interrupts our characters' progress late in the novel and gets the following terribly vivid description that gives our very homes an air of waiting menace:

What does a mudslide sound like? Movement. But what is silence, untethered? A forest holds a cracking thunder; a hillside neighborhood, its wealth in weght. What are the latent sounds of an area, in stillness, that might be released in motion? Closets of clothing, dressers packed full; giant televeisions made to appear weightless, hovering on steel brackets; cabinets stocked with spices in glass jars; refrigerators full of produce and cold meats. We live in silence that could suffocate us. Crushed under all that we own.

Or this, in which a breakthrough on Sophie's part brings back as much pain as hope:

The memory is so clear, the red Solo cup in her hand, the smell of Casey's house. She knows it is progress to conjure a memory all on her own. But, of course, it's the one that just might break her heart.

Yeah, it broke mine. 

Don't snooze on this book, or this author, friends. There are pitfalls ahead of her and this novel is going to be hard to match or surpass, but if she finds herself up to the task of trying, Meredith Westgate might be a name to keep looking for when finding new things to read for some time to come.

*Your humble blogger being the Gene Wolfe dork she is, of course this drug seems like a 21st century version of the Analeptic derived from the Alzabo in The Book of the New Sun, though at least here there's no need for a dead body or the consumption along with the drug of that dead body's brain. 

V. Castro's Queen of the Cicaidas/La Reina de las Chicharras

 I love finding out how other languages express animal sounds. Like the way in Arabic dogs say "Haw Haw" or Japanese cats say "Nyah" or pigs go "Grunz" in German. And then there are just foreign words for animals that are fun to say, and are often also versions of what sounds they make, like "Mao" for cat in Mandarin Chinese. And then there are words for insects, like the Icelandic "kakkalakki" for cockroach.

I have a new favorite one of these, and it is Chicharra, Spanish for cicaida. And, as it is frequently chanted in V. Castro's fantastically pulpy new horror novel, Queen of the Cicaidas/La Reina de las Chicharras, "Chicharrachicharracharracharra".

When I stumbled across this little gem of in the new books section of my local public library, I thought at first this might be a bilingual edition, since the title shows up on the cover in both English and Spanish, but alas, I was wrong. I was wrong about a couple of things with regards to this novel, but, you know, not alas. Because it's good.

The story starts out in the present day, when our heroine, Belinda, has to return to her old hometown of Alice, TX for a friend's wedding. Belinda has some kind of feelings about this, being herself divorced and becoming somewhat estranged from the teenaged son she's raising by herself, but she does her best to try to enjoy it... and then she discovers that the awesome wedding venue her friend has chosen is... a haunted farm!

But it's not just any old haunted farm. It's a farm where a brutal hate crime took place in the 1950s, against a lovely young undocumented farm hand named Milagros. But instead of a mere ghost of Milagros stalking the grounds and house, this farm is under the special attention of no less a figure than the Aztec goddess of the dead, Mictecacihuatl, and if you're getting Silvia Moreno-Garcia vibes, you're not alone. But V. Castro has other tricks up her sleeve than sending Belinda on a road trip with a scary skull-faced lady with a fancy headdress -- like turning Milagros into a brand new kind of monster*. The molted shells of immature cicaidas figured prominently in the torture-murder of Milagros, and so she is reborn into the undead Queen of the Cicaidas, whose legend immediately starts to grow and partakes a bit of, say, Bloody Mary but has other sights to show you as the story progresses.

This could easily have been a story of a plucky modern lady helping a nice hotel owner to purge his property of its supernatural miasma or something like that, which we've already read many times before, and it was kind of what I was expecting from the jacket copy. There are elements of this hoary old plot, sure, but there is much more, and I'm not just talking about how Belinda gets back in touch with her Mexican-American roots and especially with her Mexican side when she investigates Milagros' story and travels to the unfortunate migrant's original home to tell her family why her letters and money stopped coming so long ago. This is touching enough to make Queen of the Cicaidas stand out, but even this wasn't enough for V. Castro, who is maybe, like me, a bit of a fan of stuff like Ernest Hogan's magnificent High Aztech or something similar. I was absolutely deslighted by the unexpected turn this story took about 3/4 of the way through, when stuff happens that I'm afraid you'll have to read the novel to discover for yourself. Again, it's not a long read, but it's fun, though, prude alert: there's some graphic sex scenes near the end that I could have done without, but hey, Belinda is a lady with needs, I get it.

Speaking of, ahem, those kind of needs, I have to give this book kudos for excellent queer representation; Milagros had a girlfriend back in the day, so the farm owner's advances on her pretty person were extra unwelcome, and the modern day owner of the farm is a gay man with his poop in a group who is ready to start a family with the right partner. And no, it's not Belinda.

So, it's coming up on Halloween, you need a bit of spooky in your life that also takes on a couple of important social issues, and dishes up some godpunk and invented a whole new supernatural monster? Bow down to La Reina!

*Really, this monster/figure felt so organic to the setting that I went digging to see where she might have originated. As far as I can tell, she originated in the mind of one V. Castro, though I dunno, maybe it was inspired by the Navajo trickster god I learned about decades ago from James Hillman - variously spelled Bekotsidi or Begodchiddy, who sometimes turned into an insect in order to escape pursuit, other times, upon capture, let various insects swarm from his mouth and hair and whatnot. And dressed as a woman a lot. Great inspiration if that's where she got it, but if no, well, bravo to her for coming up with a genuinely new figure of pseudo-folklore. Who is cool AF, btw.

Also, apropos of nothing, here's maybe the person to cast if this ever gets adapted into a film. Her name is Shokotan, and for several years she made a sort of fashion statement using their discarded exoskeletons in celebration of cicada molting season in Japan. My kind of girl.

Selvedin Avdic's SEVEN TERRORS (Tr. by Coral Petrovich)

My experience of the insanely horrific war and genocide that tore through the Balkans in the 1990s was heavily mediated, chiefly by reports on NPR. To this day I still hear the names of those towns and regions in Sylvia Poggioli's distinctive voice.*

Since then I've discovered Joe Sacco, whose autobiographical comics about the conflict are harrowing to see and to read, but beautiful too, and watched all the documentaries on the conflict that YouTube has to offer, but nothing derived from that horrible epoch  has gotten under my skin quite like a short but intense and powerfully erudite little horror novel, Selvedin Avdic's Seven Terrors.

 A book with a title like that must be working off a list, one might think, and indeed a list of seven phobias does appear in its pages -- twice. And it's not the same list. Early on, we get a list that our unnamed narrator composed after hearing from a radio report that a psychologist has recommended the exercise as the first step towards getting over those fears. Later in what is basically an appendix to Seven Terrors, we get another - only this second list, we are given to understand, is cribbed from another character's researches into a bit of local folklore that has obsessed him.

The two lists do not match, though there is a little overlap between them. And the characters in Seven Terrors do not have methodically to encounter and conquer the terrors from either list in the course of the story. Selvedin Avdic is a much more interesting writer than that, and he's got a much more serious point to make: that even though, in the point in time and space that is this novel's setting (a Bosnian village in the late "oughts" or early 2010s), the Bosnian War is well over a decade in the past and thus its horrors can be thought of as having receded to a certain degree, its having happened at all is horror aplenty for its characters to cope with, and its aftermath is still horrifying.

Our narrator, whose wife left him for another man through, as he has accepted ruefully, his own fault, has just come off a nine-month depression jag that has seen him spending the whole time in bed. His Bosnian village, a tiny mining town still half-trashed by the war, doesn't exactly offer state of the art mental health services, and hey, everybody here is coping with grief and trauma and survivor's guilt and personal hurts every bit as bad as our narrator's own.

On the very day he finally seems to be pulling himself together, cleaning up and thinking about going out for a bit, a knock at his door proves to be, not local foreboding lunatic Mikhail, who periodically invades people's spaces to deliver bizarre and cryptic pronouncements that might be reminders of the past, statements on the present or presenitiments of future doom, but a young woman, Mirna, whom our hero last knew as a little girl. Mirna and her mother were sent away early in the fighting, with the promise that Mirna's father Aleksa would soon follow, but Aleksa stayed behind to help other people in worse danger than he and his feared. They kept in touch for a while, and then his letters stopped coming. Aleksa and our narrator were colleagues, journalists at a local radio station. Does our narrator know what became of Aleksa, by any chance?

He does not, so soon is pressed upon by a tearful Mirna to help her find out what happened to her father. She has come into possession of a journal he'd been keeping in the last months before he disappeared, which shows him to have been investigating legends of supernatural presences in the local mining tunnels, and indeed to have encountered a famous one: the Perkmann.** Since his encounter, the miners who at first welcomed him among their ranks have shunned him, maybe because he is a Serb, maybe because belief around the Perkmann holds that the person who has seen him is cursed (although, Aleksa maintains in his journal, this figure is also associated with warnings of disaster, and Aleksa's encounter was in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake that occurred while he was deep in the tunnels. So maybe it really is because Aleksa is a Serb). Still fascinated by the story, Aleksa kept researching and asking around, leading him to meet other sinister figures in the town who aren't nearly so supernatural as the Perkmann, but every bit as terrifying and very, very dangerous. And also some ghostly mining horses, animals who spend their entire useful lives deep underground in the dark and are thus blind by the time they are retired and brought to the surface. To live out the rest of their lives on one of those farms that's too far away to visit and they can't visit you either it's just too far. But nobody's ever short on glue.

But this isn't really a spook story. It's one man's oblique approach to all of the mundane horrors that are too traumatic to confront directly, complicated by everybody else trying to do the same. Shattered psyches everywhere, still with jagged edges to cut each other with on the slightest approach. It's heartbreaking and sad and beautiful.

It's also, often, funny in weird and unpredictable ways. Our narrator having been a radio journalist and our author being an intelligent man who lives in the world, his account is sprinkled with references to American pop culture and some surprisingly passionate opinions about it. A footnote (yes, a novel with footnotes, but hush, this is not some David Foster Wallace infinite jesting, just some cultural clarifications and the odd tangent) veers into considerable vitriol against Vogue magazine in general and Anna Wintour in particular, which seems like a very odd thing for a novel like this to do, but it doesn't feel odd when it happens. And it reminds us that, while we may have the luxury of ignorance about people in other countries living through horrors other than ours, most of them don't have the reciprocal luxury when it comes to us. Our dumbest pop culture tidbits erupt right into their reality and thus their thoughts and discourse, even when examining hurts uniquely their own. A lot more literature is translated from our language into theirs than ever will be from theirs into ours -- and our readers barely read what is written by us, for us, let alone what's been imported from abroad. See also Chad W. Post's The Three Percent Problem.

As for the translation itself, it's resulted in some beautiful English prose that carries some startling and original imagery. One never knows, on this end, what images are carried over wholesale from the original and what are developed by the translator to mimic the effect of something untranslatable, but Coral Petrovich has one way or another given us some stunning English sentences like "At first, a terrible nervousness overcame me, I could have slid out of my skin like soap from a fist." That's one of those that's going to live rent-free in my head for a long time, like Haruki Murakami/Jay Rubin's bit in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle "I glanced at the phone in the living room. It sat on the table, cloaked in silence. It looked like a deep-sea creature pretending to be an inanimate object, crouching there in wait for its prey."

I don't imagine that, in this dreadful eternal year that is still basically 2020, a lot of us are actively looking for stories that remind us that our imagination holds no horrors that are really worse than what we do to each other in real life, but sometimes it is good to see it in a highly original form, and so for that if not for any of the other reasons I've sort of given here, I recommend that you set aside a little time -- and at 149 pages, you won't need much for the actual reading so much as for coming to terms with it after -- and spend it with Seven Terrors.

*I'm Gen X. I was a 20-something in the 90s and too poor for anything but snowy analog broadcast TV and commuted the six miles to work on foot to save time and bus fare. NPR was pretty much my lens on everything.

**Who seems to be a local version of a figure in German folklore called the Bergmonch.