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...

Solvej Balle's ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME, VOLUME ONE (Tr by Barbara Haveland, Narr by Elizabeth Liang)

I have discovered something uncanny. Or at least, it is not something that I have discovered, because I already knew it, but I have discovered that it is uncanny. It's a problem that I cannot solve. There are ghosts and monsters. Thomas is the ghost, and I am the monster.

Back when I could still play video games on a console with a controller, despite the fact that my hands and arms worked perfectly well, even brilliantly (I had a triple digit typing speed with a very low error rate, a skill with which I have earned a better living than any other, to my eventual downfall), I really sucked at them. A great failure at combos, a great button masher in combat, a great repeat wanderer of labyrinthine game maps, and a greater misser of clues was I. Which meant I spent a lot of time playing scenes over and over again so as not to die, so as to pick up the object I'd missed last time that I can't progress without, so as to finally finish the fucking driving level.*

And now someone has captured exactly that experience in a prose novel. Which, quite unexpectedly, does not suck nearly as much as starting all over again for the hundredth, two hundredth, who knows how many hundredth time at the beginning of a level does. Though it tries.

I first learned about the internationally acclaimed On the Calculation of Volume, Volume One, from my dear old booksnobbing pal SJ, she of the dodisharkicorn, who was all but jumping up and down and screaming at me to read this the second she finished it. There are not many people I allow to to this to me, by the way, but when Sarajean says something is good, I add it to the TBR, and when she goes bananas like Eric Cartman at Casa Bonita about something, I prioritize it. And when that thing then goes on to make not only the long but the short list for the International Booker Prize, I know I've got to hurry up and get it before every single Booktuber I follow wrings it dry for content. Even if I have a strong feeling that I've all but read it already as it is. Which, ha ha ha...

But so, why am I talking about repeating video game levels in a post about a critically lauded novel? Because it's a novel of repetition, of course; it's everybody's favorite repetition story, Groundhog Day, or, if you're a real nerd, the Stargate SG-1 episode "Window of Opportunity."

Our heroine, whose name I've already forgotten but can't be arsed to look up and anyway it was a library book with a long waiting list, runs a very specialized antiquarian book dealership with her husband, Thomas, out of their home, and either makes enough money from this to live very comfortably in rural France, or one or both of them brought their own money. I strongly suspect the latter because she mentions that her husband inherited their cozy cottage and has never lived anywhere else. So already this is a super relatable protagonist here and, spoiler alert, I don't much care for her because she's also very boring. But anyway...

As what passes for events start unfolding, she is on a business trip to Paris and has had a pleasantly successful visit, finding several books that fit her very specific rubric and reconnecting with an old friend who runs a beautiful Parisian antiques shop with his brand shiny new girlfriend with whom we at first are led to think there might be some conflict but no, everything is lovely and they have a perfect evening with the exception of a small mishap that leaves our heroine with a slightly burned hand that will become a touchstone through what follows. Touchburn, I guess?

The next morning, she discovers that she is living the exact same day over again. She is not herself compelled to repeat the previous day's actions but everything else around her happens exactly as it did the day before. She spends a few days in Paris trying to test out just how faithfully the rest of the world is repeating itself before deciding to head home and see if her husband can help her figure all this out.

The next chunk of the novel finds her growing increasingly frustrated with her situation and her husband, who never flat out disbelieves her or treats her like she's crazy (again, no conflict is allowed), and does try to help her, but has to have everything explained to him every single day, when he wakes up (mostly) pleasantly surprised to find her home a day early. And she starts to understand that not only is he not going to be much help, but that they are drifting farther and farther apart even as they share meals and make plans and have sex; from her perspective, time is moving forward and she is keeping track of how many times she has repeated this same date (November 18) and sometime during the night he forgets everything they've said and done. From his, it's just another day with his nice wife in his nice life and tomorrow will be another (that she might never see?) one. If this persists for a long enough time, the reader realizes, though she never verbalizes this, she will age while he will not, she will change and he'll stay the same. 

Tara. Her name is Tara. Yes.

Much is made in reviews of this series, which will eventually comprise seven volumes, of how sad and tragic this is, and Solvej Balle her translator, Barbara Haveland, and the almost farcically even keeled narrator, Elizabeth Liang, convey this simply and beautifully, even as our heroine retreats physically from her coexistence with this "ghost" of her husband, moving herself into their guest room and, having long ago memorized her husband's path through his day well enough to predict it, minute by minute, avoiding him altogether while she tallies up hundreds of days and performs half-hearted little experiments to determine the parameters of her imprisonment in time. And comes to think of herself as the monster, secretly sharing her husband's house and consuming its resources.

What keeps this narrative even remotely interesting is the aforementioned parameters of this time loop. The burn on her hand heals a little bit more each day until it's a faint scar; even though it happened in Paris, where she no longer is, from contact with a heater she only touched on the very first November 18th but never even went near on any of the subsequent subjective days. The books she bought in Paris had disappeared when she awakened on Day Two, forcing her to return to the shops where she bought them, but then on Day Three and onward they (mostly) persisted in her possession. But a gift that she bought in Paris and gave to her husband is gone the next day, from her perspective, and, of course, never existed, from his.

Most importantly for her long-term existence, any food she consumes is removed from the universe forever; anything she, for instance, buys from a shop and then eats, will no longer be for sale in that shop on subsequent days, even though in every other way said shop will be identical and the people in it behaving identically unless interacting directly with her. And anything she eats from the pantry or fridge at the cottage will also disappear. Sooner or later there will be nothing left in her village and she will have to go further afield.

So it's really just the mystery of what's going on and how she's going to figure this out that provides any story at all. I mean, eventually she's going to encounter at least a small level of privation in the next six books once she's eaten herself out of her location, but otherwise...? As averse as Balle has been to introducing any drama apart from our heroine's admittedly touching, weary sadness, I can't count on that, though 

One thing that did enchant and intrigue me, though, was an allusion to Adolfo Bioy Casares' uncanny and haunting novella, The Invention of Morel: not only is her friend in Paris surnamed Morel, but there is in the back room of his store a hint of a mysterious device that has the potential to be the key to Tara's entire plight. We only get a tantalizing glimpse of this possibility in this first volume. It is this and only this that truly draws my curiosity toward its sequels.

For otherwise, I have to ask myself, am I up to spending six more novels with this boring, privileged character, who only sort of seems to love her husband (seriously, the way she describes their relationship, even when they're boning, is a snooze) and never gets excited about anything and never even shows any emotion but sadness-about-being-parted-from-Thomas? I'm really not sure. I mean, she's not gonna be golfing into a wormhole anyone soon, iykwim. Still, I might give Volume Two of The Calculation of Volume a chance sometime, because I am still intrigued by the overall situation.

But then again, I could just let the Internet or SJ spoil this for me and move on to all the other shinies still on my TBR. A new set of Internet friends and fellow lovers of what the wags are calling "high brodernism" have convinced me that it's time to read Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which I peeked at and was immediately captivated in a way I wasn't with this, so, you know. 

At least On the Calculation of Volume, Volume One, was short.

*Seriously, had they really been a thing back then, I could have had the worst Let's Play channel on all of YouTube. They'd have maybe paid me not to play!

Adam Levin's THE INSTRUCTIONS

The rest of the crowd booed. Not so much at Maholtz as the implications of the anticlimax he and I had just provided them. To see an oppressor felled without a hint of violent struggle can’t help but tarnish the shine on your victim badge. To see Maholtz made to cower so easily had to make those who would have otherwise cheered wonder how they, for so long, could have cowered so readily before him. They were booing themselves.

If Michael Pemulis, the very best character in Infinite Jest who is neither in drag nor in a wheelchair, were about five years younger and a student at a Chicago area day school instead of a Boston area tennis academy, he would be Gurion ben-Judah Macabee, the criminally, the messianically precocious hero of Adam Levin's big honking fiction chonk, The Instructions. Except instead of a tennis racket, our boy is packing a weapon of his own devising called a penny gun, and a pocketful of tiny metal wing nuts.

And a brain, an insight into humanity, and an advanced understanding of ethics that would shame any of the Incandenza family, would probably shame a Dostoevsky character. 

I am a middle aged Wyoming woman, neither a 21st century middle schooler, nor a child of the suburbs, nor even a little bit Jewish* so I'm about as under-equipped a reader for this novel as one could ask for, but I read it with admiration and delight anyway.

I was as charmed by its depictions of actually healthy and loving family dynamics as fascinated by its eternal school day themes of intra- and inter-clique politics, petty and serious rebellion, unjustly wielded authority, unbearable boredom, grandiose plans for the future, philosophical speculations both juvenile and profound, concerns earthly and spiritual and, of course, young love. 

But what young love it is: 

Above all, June and I were in love. I wanted reassurance because she’d gotten winked at, but it wasn’t her fault that she’d gotten winked at. It was Berman’s fault. He shouldn’t have winked. He shouldn’t have gotten me wanting reassurance. Especially because there could be no reassurance. That’s what was chomsky. To think that a hand-squeeze would reassure was chomsky. Had June squeezed my hand, I wouldn’t feel reassured; I’d only wonder why she thought I wanted reassurance. I’d worry that she thought I wanted reassurance because Berman’s wink was, in fact, worth worrying about. = If June had squeezed my hand, I’d want more reassurance. And I saw it was good that she hadn’t squeezed my hand. Which isn’t to say I stopped wanting reassurance, but that all at once I saw what needed doing, not to me or for me, but by me: I had to tell Berman not to wink at my girlfriend. Had he not been an Israelite, I’d’ve thought of that sooner, gone straight to confrontation. Instead of burning sweaty seconds lamely sorting useless feelings, I’d have risen to my feet and said, Don’t you fucken wink at her.

A big thinker as well as an over-thinker is Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, who is already infamous when he first shows up for classes in a new middle school, where his prior record of fights and rebellion lands him immediately in the school's special disciplinary unit called The Cage, in which every student is confined to an individual carrel and is closely monitored by a beady-eyed Australian disciplinarian with a name, Botha, that I associate with South African apartheid (I'm sure not accidentally am I so reminded). He doesn't teach, doesn't do anything but watch the students like a hawk and enforce the Cage's infinitely long list of behavioral standards while other teachers nervously present lessons to around 30 fifth through seventh graders, which Gurion is, I think, the only fifth grader by age but, as compensation for his immediate entry to The Cage, the school also agreed to honor his prior promotion to seventh grade on account of his intellect. 

Classic, this. 

But so, Gurion is very, very concerned about justice (and his father is a renowned civil rights attorney), about studying the Torah and about promoting the welfare of his co-religionists to whom he refers as Israelites rather than as being Jewish students. One of his many acts prior to his advent at his current school was to invent a punk little weapon constructed from the top of a plastic soda bottle and a rubber band, and to write out minutely detailed instructions on its construction and use, as well as to design a strict ritual for how this knowledge is to be taught and disseminated., starting with: Only to Israelites. His goal is to arm every Israelite boy in Greater Chicago and beyond with a weapon easily broken down into disposable trash, but capable of launching a small projectile (he uses a penny and calls it, thus, the Pennygun, but we encounter a sort of co-inventor who came up with the same device independently but uses it to fire fountain pen nibs and thus calls it the Pengun). This weapon has achieved a mythic status among devotees of The Instructions as evident from this YouTube clip explaining it.

Gurion also has a loftier project going on than merely helping young Jewish boys to defend themselves from antisemites and school bullies, however; he has been drafting for some time a work he fully expects will one day be regarded as scripture. And many of his former schoolmates, forbidden though they are by their parents from associating with him ever again, consider him a wise leader and teacher, even to calling him Rabbi, and agree that his writings will indeed become scripture. Two of whom, we learn, have even served as translators, necessary because Gurion chose to write about half of the original in Hebrew.

So is this book a very long marriage of The Books of Jacob and Heathers? Certainly more so than it is a descendant of Infinite Jest, for all that I invoked that book at the start of this post. Gurion does feel a bit like Pemulus, but differs vastly from that yachtsman-capped mischief-maker in that, for starters, the closest he ever comes to mind-altering substances is a cigarette or two he is deftly manipulated into sharing with the school's Golden Boy as Golden Boy seeks to co-opt Gurion's growing authority as an outcast leader. Which Gurion only figures out later, but don't you worry. Everybody gets their due in this massive work. Justice is served, like revenge, a bit cold... Or maybe not so cold?

For, on top of everything else, we find that author Adam Levin can write the best kind of action scenes, in which every shot, punch, kick, launch and thwack is clearly delineated, precisely described, but the pace is never allowed to lag. I say this as someone who often skips long flight scenes because I find them boring. But I mean...

By my side, on his knees again, Desormie gripped my face by the jaw and started squeezing. I bonked him with the megaphone. He squeezed unfazed. I got the bell to his ear and flipped on the siren. He threw himself backwards and I started getting up, but my hurt wrist kept folding beneath my weight and Desormie returned and he kicked me in the stomach.

The above is even better if you know who Desormie is. Neener.

And this, from a special sub-plot we can call the Revenge of the Band Kids, in which Levin shows us the weapon in everything:

Their brass scarred from teeth and their padcups askew, the bandkids were blitzing in squads of fours and fives, walking through the mini-riots, mowing down anyone. Cymbalists alternated neckchops with headclaps. Flautists pulled their flutes apart for double-fisted piking. Tubas and euphoniums remained strapped to players who held them under-arm to ram with like jousters. Splinters poked from fractures in oboes used for skullshots. The buttons jammed forever on trumpets gone knuckleduster.

Which is to say that, at heart, The Instructions is a war story at least in as much as the famous Pillow Fort vs Blanket Fort episode of Community was. Well, except instead of blankets and pillows we have actual blows exchanged and projectile pennies, wing nuts and pen nibs fired by Gurion's small army, the Side of Damage (and their junior auxiliaries, Big Ending and The Five, which, get ready for those five scene-stealing Best Buddies**) at their foes, the Arrangement. What, you thought that cover art was symbolic? This is middle school.

But so, my readers may well ask, is this a tale that really needs so many hundreds of pages to tell? Oh, yes. But are they really so satisfying, those pages? Also yes.

And I haven't even gotten around to all of the terrific character drama, the terrific characters, like Gurion's brand shiny new girlfriend, the fierce and fiery and newly-converting-for-his-sake June Watermark. And his best friend Benji Nakamook. And the one they call Brooklyn, as newly arrived as Gurion with even more dramatic a back story, with whom Gurion bonds immediately and who challenges him in ways Gurion usually only experiences with adults. If it weren't for the buddies of The Five, Brooklyn would be my favorite character in the book. 

And there are so many more. By the novel's climatic combat scene, the reader knows most of the Side very well, has watched a few of them fall in love (mutually!) and others learn for the first time that they have power. Usually for the better. Usually.

And yes, like so many books I'm reading now, this one seems to be more important to the present moment than to the one in which it was written, for all that it is a tale that could only take place then (2007), could only feature characters born just before 9/11 and raised doing active shooter drills in school. More than ever I am convinced that the Zoomers, largely the children of my own Generation X, are fundamentally different beings from those of us who remember not having to take off their shoes in public in order to board a plane and when phones were fastened to walls and History supposedly had an End, in whichever way you choose to define that word. Theirs is a fundamentally different world and they are prepared to live in an even stranger one. 

Too, lots of us have been promulgating the "gonna tell my grandkids" meme for years. What if they were to believe us? Because they don't really care? Because they have real problems, but have also at least solved the problem of what to do with all of those pennies lying around everywhere. It's a better idea than CoinStar or whatever. 

We damage we.

All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Knowing, as you do, from the second reading forward, that A will lead to B, to Y to Z, your post-first readings are far more concerned with what exactly happens between those events, far more concerned with those parts you scanned (or even skipped) the first go-round in your rush to discover what would happen next.

Yeah, that's pretty much Gurion, and by extension, Adam Levin, equating their own book with the other great ones. But here's the thing: it is their equal. And I'm already looking forward to reading it again. I underappreciated some of these kids the first time. Including, possibly, Gurion himself!

Damn.

*My nickname at Bard among my soon-to-be dining companions for four years of mealtime shenanigans was "Blond and Blue" as in "Uh oh, Blond and Blue is giving me shit" -- at least until one way discovered that my name rhymes with a famous Dinah Shore ditty that serves as the theme song to, coincidentally, the movie "Heathers" thus guaranteeing me four years of hearing my name sung out loudly and not very tunefully before every meal I ate in Kline Commons. I was a member of an all-gentile cast of the Purim play one year, though...

**I've quoted too much from the climax, but I have to add just one snippet of The Five in action:

The Five were fine too; didn’t need coverage either. Bored with Shlomo, who no longer convulsed, and glimpsing Eliyahu between heads and shoulders, they gamboled toward the south wall, the better to see, a capering troop that undermined its native cuteness shooting mystified kids in the eyes at close range, stepping on crotches and faces on purpose, vociferating multiple Yiddish vulgarities.

These are little guys, maybe ten years old (like Gurion himself, actually, which is part of why, maybe, he takes them seriously where others would pat them on the heads and imagine them in propeller beanies), who have already had enough of bullying but quickly learned that if they can count on each other, they count. And since one of their number got pasted in the halls earlier in the week, they have their own little vendetta against the aforementioned Shlomo, who forfeited his Israelite status when he picked on the shrimp in order to commit a hate crime by proxy. And I mean, one of them even gets to rescue a cheerleader from a groper, with masterful fifth-grade aplomb. Egads, these kids are the greatest!

Support My Public Library, Won't You?

Now is a pretty rough time for libraries. The current administration, busy attacking everything good about civil society, has not neglected to try to undermine our country's public library system. But libraries aren't going down without a fight if we give them our support. 

I'm a retired lady living on a tiny pension that leaves next to nothing in the way of a book buying budget. This means that if you've ever appreciated a post of mine over the last five years, chances are very, very good that I got the material from the Natrona County Public Library in Casper, WY.

I've never asked you for anything unless you count my two little books I have links to on this page. But if you've ever wanted to give me a little thank you, may I suggest a cute tee shirt or tote from them? I just got the Checked Out one. 

BTW, the sculpture in the photo above is of Prometheus. He's a celebrated local landmark here in Casper, as you'll see on some of the designs. 

I'll post a selfie in my shirt when I get it.

Thank you!

Phillip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's AMERICA AND THE CULT OF THE CACTUS BOOTS: A DIAGNOSTIC

I have a very special category on my reading tracker app which I call "On Dead Tree Despite the Pain," which, if I have actually finished a book, actually says more about my regard for said book than, say, whether I've managed to write about it here at Kate of Mind. I was not only interested enough in the book to start it despite the pain I knew it would cause me (long time readers of this here blog know that physical "on dead tree" books are extremely uncomfortable for me to read and trade paperbacks are the worst of all), which I only undertake if there's no other option, but also so engaged by said book that I actually suffered its physical effects just to completely experience it at first hand. 

I'm undertaking a modified "read what you own" type challenge*, and have acquired over the last many years a pretty significant stack of books that I really really really want to read but are either only available on dead tree or are unreasonably priced in digital or audio editions (charging more for an ebook than for a new copy in hardcover or paperback will never be ok), so you're going to see quite a few of these in the next few months.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is a relatively recent acquisition for me, but the very idea of this book and the buzz around it in my very favorite weirdo literary corners of the internet meant that of all the physical books that I'm ready with which to torture myself, this was the one that most elicited cries of "hurt me, daddy" from my imaginal lips. 

I mean, look at it, for a start. And this is just the front cover, mind.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is going to be a very difficult book to talk about because very difficult to do justice to, but it's a book that simply must be discussed at enthusiastic, bewildered, what-the-fuck, best medicine on paper lengths. 

Especially in year one of The Re-Trumpening Muskification, aka the Enshittification of the country about which this novel chiefly concerns itself. 

We learn from the jacket copy that it was written in the last year of our first overtly felonious POTUS' first term, while we all anxiously hoped and waited and worked to get the felon the hell out of there and as we ultimately succeeded (more or less), but the time it now feels like America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots is most needed for is right now.

At least until something even worse happens. 

And look; while this is ultimately a therapeutic and a hopeful read, the fact that this book exists in any form also makes me a little nervous, because the current regime could take some mighty terrible ideas from its pages, if they can persuade anybody with enough smarts and soul to understand it to explain it to them. Like the Total Information Control Initiative, which not only seeks to completely eliminate the written word from humanity's present and future (and even its past inasmuchas once the written word is successfully eliminated, so is most of our collective memory), but has a truly diabolical means of doing so that tells Ray Bradbury's Firemen to not so much hold its beer as go on permanent furlough the better to cross the entire supercontinent of the Americas on foot to fetch a whole new kind of beverage the likes of which do not exist as yet. By which I mean the whole enterprise of destroying books and printing presses and whatnot is not nearly the priority our reading lives have led us to prepare for. Instead, the TICI promulgates a high tech electro-psychotropic screen that the user straps on right over the face, a device so entertaining and so pleasurable to use that nobody (or almost nobody) really needs to be forced to prefer it to reading or possibly even speaking. Supplied free of charge, it is, of course, also subject to constant tinkering and updates to ratchet up its addictive properties and its ability to spy on and later replace the contents of the users' very minds.

I mean, Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Neurolink, everyone?

Never mind that, kind of like Roko's Basilisk, there's not actually any guarantee that such a thing is even possible given stuff like resource availability and the universe's tendency toward entropy and sheer individual human cussedness and the actual feasibility of getting everybody to always react to the same thing in the same way in a world where, for example, people can have paradoxical reactions to medications and some people are actually repelled by sex and some people are genetically disposed to perceive cilantro as tasting like soap ...

Which, of course, is how, within the world of AatCotCB, at least on its Most Pathetic Level of Reality, there are still some dissidents here and there who cling to their books and underground newspapers and shampoo bottles to read on the toilet, including the novel's dual heroes, Phillip Freedenberg and Jeff Walton, who yes, happen to be the metafictional avatars of the author and visualizer/illustrator of this book. On the Most Pathetic Level of this book's Reality, they are employed at a Buffalo, NY print/lithography shop and have, as the story begins, just recently completed a large order of high quality protest signs that demand we all MAKE AMERICA READ AGAIN and seem destined to reap some terrible consequences at the hands of U.S. President RALPH's new Total Information Control Initiative, rumored even now to be approaching their building. 

While this and related tasks had been ongoing, the pair have been eagerly awaiting the arrival from faraway Slovenia (yes, this is more corona/samizdattery) of a novel by Rick Harsch entitled The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas** an actual book in our own world which, at the time of AatCotCB's writing, could only be acquired by emailing the author, one Rick Harsch, sending him the price and shipping costs via an Internet payment service, and then sitting back and waiting for the author (who is also corona-samizdat's publisher, warehouse manager and shipping clerk) to send the book from Izola, Slovenia to your own dear personal mailing address.

While they waited, they were inspired to begin writing and illustrating AatCotCB, which Harsch had already expressed willingness to publish, both in our real world and in the novel's MPLoR.

But so, even as the pair have begun to conceive of this work, it is already bursting into this work and into their world, sometimes in relatively tame ways like their sudden discovery in the attic of their shop a cool antique radio by which they can occasionally receive "Messages from the Great Beyond," more mundanely regarded as weird bursts of very targeted shortwave radio transmissions from none other than the author of the book they're waiting for and who has already agreed to publish AatCotCB, Harsch, who seems eeriely omniscient about their predicament and eager to warn them not only of the imminent approach of the Total Information Control Initiative but also of the presence, just outside their office door, of a full camera crew preparing to shoot the opening scenes of the film adaptation of AatCotCB.

And then the book starts getting weird. 

Like descriptions of competitive clothes ironing as extreme sport weird. Like a giant, near-infinite information processing network constructed on and between the brains of a vast herd of cattle (unknown whether dairy or beef cattle) living in a vast underground facility in the Midwest weird. Like one of the character's two hands disappearing from his body and much later being found, the hands, living independently and working as a park ranger in Alaska weird. Just a pair of youngish male human hands giving you directions and cleaning the latrines and telling you not to pet the grizzly bears. Ho hum.

And there are illustrations. Glorious, glorious illustrations from the demented genius mind and hand of Jeff Walton, who combines the painstaking, detailed realism of a scientific illustrator with his deep insights into the imagination of his longtime friend, author Phillip Freedenberg and a powerful sense of psychedelic whimsy to create the kind of works that belong, in poster form, on every college kid's dorm room wall and many of which would make utterly amazing tattoos if you could find an artist who could do them justice without taking psychic damage. 

And hey, you ergodic literature fans, you freaks pining for a new House of Leaves-style bibliographic experience, AatCotCB has you covered. See, Phillip and Jeff and sometimes a cute little homunculus of Rick Harsch wind up traveling through the "word tunnels" of AatCotCB, The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, and an unfinished novel Freedenberg started writing some 20 years ago, and the reader must really on subtle textual clues to determine in which book's lines through which they are currently moving or, occasionally, being chased. And one form of attack they occasionally experience takes the form of a "word fever" in which Phillip begins spouting lines and lines and sometimes pages and pages of surreal... I almost want to call it word salad but it's kind of... word salad that hasn't been tossed yet? So it's got defined layers and just enough hints of connection and is still formed into grammatical units that function like sentences and sometimes even seem to be carrying actual meaning but then seem to collapse into incoherence again and start to feel skippable, but Freedenberg has an uncanny sense for how much patience his readers are bringing to the exercise of reading his word fever symptoms and drops in a few lines that actually communicate something right there to keep one going. 

Or at least it seemed that way to me.

Oh, and there are constant other textual tricks that tempt the reader to page back, sometimes hundreds is pages, to reinterpret a scene, image or illustration, which will be great fun for some and really annoying to others. I thought it was fun, mostly. 

But none of this I've said so far adequately conveys the truly tonic effect of this work. It's not just a celebration of creativity but a cry out for it as one of the only things that can save is from "gestures at everything" and the despair to which the everything counts on us succumbing. The whole reason this book exists is to join up its readers in a Unified Field of free thinking, weirdness for its own sake, and the will to create something new, even if it sucks. Maybe especially if it sucks? These seem like very warm-hearted and forgiving guys, the kind of guys who would work extra hard to find something to praise, some way to encourage the creator of, even the most pedestrian work of fiction/drawing/bit of music/piece of fiber art/whatever as long as it was sincerely offered.

The world needs much more of these guys, and much more from them. But, as we got hung up on saying to each other during my very first personal experiment with psychedelics, "You can do it, too. It's not a show!"

Bring it, my darlings. And yes, that includes you, Phill, Jeff, Rick... Actually, Rick is good. I mean, he's even published a cookbook recently.

*I'm making exceptions for things I've previously requested from my public library that, all but at random from my perspective, suddenly come available, and also for a bunch of books I've been longing to read for years that are available via Kobo+ and are thus suddenly within my budget. But otherwise, it's a stack of trade paperbacks sitting in my reading room and the contents of the ebook reader that shall no longer be named. And believe me, there are years and years worth of TBR on there. The story bundles alone are staggering.

**Which is next on my list of books I'll be reading on dead tree despite the pain, so stay tuned. It will be my first Rick Harsch book. I hope it's as delightful as he is.