Fleur Jaeggy's THE WATER STATUES (Tr by Gini Alhadeff)

On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion. Though thin, at the core of his bones there was steel.

When a book is full of sentences like this, as Fleur Jaeggy's The Water Statues is, I wind up thinking even more about the translator than the author. I can't help but imagine Gini Alhadeff sitting and pondering each one, searching for a precise word order, an exact placement of modifying phrases and clauses, with an expression of concentration but also a slackness to her face not unlike the novella's protagonist, here.

The Water Statues, though even more compact than its page count might indicate, is densely packed with some of the most extraordinary sentences I've ever encountered, and for this reason alone is a book I would suggest to anyone because at least one of them is bound to resonate for them. So yes, the temptation to quote half of the book here is powerful, but I resist, because I don't want to rob you, reader, of the experience beyond what I already have.

The Water Statues might be an account of a young man, Beeklam, wondering why he can't grieve as his father does for his recently deceased mother, but then again it might be an account of that same person but as an old man, Beeklam, who is regretting the sale of his three best statues, one of which someone at some point had named after Beeklam's dead mother. Why not both, you might ask, to which I would reply, not this time. This book is like one of those weird plastic holograms we used to see all the time that contained two completely different images but only showed one at a time, depending on how light was hitting it. The old man, Beeklam, really doesn't seem like he was ever the young man, Beeklam, in the past, or vice versa. Their stories just occupy this same space. 

And what a space it is. Beeklam lives in Amsterdam in a house near the water with a flooded basement full of statues. A 21st century reader can't help but be reminded of Susanna Clarke's magnificent Piranesi, though this space is small and confined, with no tides washing through to freshen the waters and bring sea life to its rooms. Beeklam has deliberately caused this out of a desire to live like one who has drowned. 

Yes, it's all very strange, the more so for a static, dreamlike quality that would feel to have leaked over from something like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World but for the habit of The Water Statues' characters to soliloquize as though a proscenium arch has just appeared above them, a quality all this novella's own.

I have read stranger books, even just this year, but none of them have made me feel quite as unmoored as this one 

Layla Martinez' WOODWORM (Tr Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott; Narr Raquel Beattie)

How a novelist handles tension is everything in horror and suspense. Most of what I encounter in these genres lets tension build and build and build until it's pretty near unbearable and then releases it all in an ecstatic final climax. And that's fun and satisfying and takes a certain amount of skill and a sure grasp of one's story that I can only admire. 

Other authors, though, authors like Spanish novelist and essayist Layla Martinez, construct something more intricate, full of small winding bits and catches and very, very controlled little releases. I suppose people would describe this as "edging" but it's more interesting than that in Woodworm, with its pair of narrators (a grandmother and granddaughter) and its exquisite blend of supernatural horror, generational trauma, class resentment and elements of rural soap opera.

And it's short, not even 150 pages in Sophie Hughes' and Annie McDermott's English translation, which is full of interesting alliterations and rhythms that really translate wonderfully to the audio book medium, which is how I experienced Woodworm. 

But speaking of translation, one thing that gets lost in it here is the effectiveness of the book's title; in Spanish this book is called Carcoma*, which literally means "woodworm," but the onomatopoeia of the word spoken aloud is also a sound effect the author and the audio book narrator employ magnificently to convey many of the strange noises made by the ghosts and other malevolent presences as they go about their spooky business. 

For this is a haunted house story. The animated spirits of the dead, though, are the least interesting things haunting this house, originally built by a very bad man to contain -- really to entrap -- the poor woman he married in order to found the dynasty of unfortunate women condemned to live in the house and the nasty, gossipy, judgy and destitute Spanish village surrounding it.

The founding patriarch, by the way, made a habit of entrapping women, using his personal attractiveness, Andrew Tate-style, to draw in  many of them, only to manipulate them into prostitution to make him a small fortune, which in turn is how he afforded a fine house for the one he decided to marry, only to make her the most miserable of them all.

This pimp-patriarch (pimptriarch?) is the grandfather of one of our two narrators (unnamed; nobody in this novel has a first name and only one family -- significantly not the family living in the House -- gets a surname), a woman we only come to know as "The Old Woman" who has by reputation and necessity come to serve the region as a cunning woman, dispensing simple remedies and charms and curses to her neighbors, who despise and fear her, but not enough not to dispense with her services. The Old Woman is also subject to what we can only think of as absence seizures, in which supernatural beings "take her away" for hours at a time to share secrets with her. The Old Woman believes, or at least professes to believe, that these are saints, specific ones like Saint Lucy or Saint Sebastian (heavy on the martyrs with grotesque iconography, or who died by torture, or both), and further believes that it is via her prayers to them that her ill will against people who have wronged her, her daughter or her granddaughter, is put into effect. Enemies of the household accidentally break their legs in improbable accidents, go missing, get sick and die, all through her prayers to her "saints."

Of course the reader is skeptical, not about the reality of these "saints", but that they're really saints at all, especially when her granddaughter, "The Girl" who is our other narrator, reveals that their house is also visited by angels, and that angels don't really look at all like they do in Renaissance paintings and Catholic iconography. They're more like giant praying mantises with huge compound eyes. See the novel's Portuguese cover below.

Meanwhile, The Girl has grown up without parents; her teenaged mother was murdered (by one of two paramours) shortly after The Girl was born, and the girl's wealthy and privileged (probable) father has never acknowledged her, might not even know she exists for all that one of his family's many homes is next door to that of The Girl and The Old Woman. His is the family who gets a surname, and who long ago sought to employ the Pimptriarch's family members as domestic servants - a measure the Pimptriarch's pride would not permit, but one of which his descendants, including both The Old Woman and later The Girl, in turn, avail themselves, to the disdain of all. 

The inciting incident takes place in this rich neighbor's household, when The Girl allows, whether out of neglect or of simple and resentful malice, a great calamity to befall her cruel and snobbish employers, coincidentally at about the same time as The Girl first notices that her own mother's restless and fitful remnant is one of the many shades haunting her family's ancestral prison of a home. You know, the mother who got it on with the rich boy next door and then got murdered, either by him or by the boy she was gonna marry since the rich boy was leaving her to fend for herself and the baby...

It is left ambiguous as to what, if any of the weird and frightening phenomena that characterize the House can be attributed to The Girl's mother, whose ghost (?) is condemned continually to enter the place via the front door, versus the family's many other malevolent ancestors and their helpmeets of dubious nature and provenance. Something haunts a wardrobe in the bedroom The Old Woman and The Girl share; it does its best to lure people inside it, never to be seen again. Something else produces an apparition of a pair of legs that protrudes from under The Old Woman's bed. Then there are the aforementioned "saints" and "angels" who supply The Old Woman with endless gossip and the odd bit of important and actionable intelligence. All of these manifestations are barely regarded by the living women of the House, though The Girl, in her chapters, still expresses a certain pride in her ability to resist the wardrobe's blandishments and to ignore the whispers and cracks and carcoma/caruncho sounds that wake her in the night.

Woodworm is thus an incredibly effective and multilayered** bit of modern horror fiction, full of heavy emotional impact and genuine chills -- and surprises. It would have been so easy for Martinez to give The Girl a fate similar to her grandmother's or her mother's, the same only more brutal. Hints that this might happen abound. But while The Girl is as bound to the House as any of them, her own inner strength and resourcefulness let her remain her own character with her own agency and her own ideas about how to avenge her mother's family against her (probable) father's and against the villagers who have also done more than a little to add to their misery. Martinez and The Girl have other and more interesting plans, though, that lead to an even more satisfying conclusion than I felt I had any right to expect.

If there is a flaw in this work, it is in the audio book production. Raquel Beattie, the narrator, appears to be very much a go-to for Latina/Hispanic fiction and the narration thereof, especially if it requires an appropriate accent. But this is not a work of Latin American fiction, but of Spanish, so she uses her own standard American English speech patterns -- except for a rather cartoonish lisp, the kind that Americans who want to show off their sophistication affect when pronouncing place names like Ibiza (with a theta sound for the "z"). Which lisp she imposes throughout the text on all the ordinary English words of the translation, rather than on just the Spanish nouns and names. And she gives The Girl, who is rather more of an asexual Amazon than a nymphette, a breathy and sensual voice to differentiate her from The Old Woman (whose voice is ideal for the character, tough and serious and weary and protective and, yes, resentful) that really just annoyed me. So I kept being yanked out of this utterly incredible book by the narration. This would have angered me more if I hadn't just DNF'd another audio book that I stuck with way longer than I would have in print just because the narrator gave it a better performance than the material deserved. I figured they balanced each other out. 

And I never once considered setting Woodworm aside, despite my mild irritation at the audio. I would even listen to it again sometime, though I would really rather experience it as text. But Audible got me with an incredible sale price and Woodworm had been on my TBR for quite a long time, and...

Anyway, I sure hope Martinez, who seems more inclined to non-fiction than fiction of any kind, does decide to write another novel or two or three. I'm here for them if she does!

*It's even better in the Portuguese translation: Caruncho!

**I mean, I haven't even gotten into all the echoes of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime that echo through this tale. As my beloved Langdon from the Death//Sentence podcast observed of this book, it's the most Spanish thing imaginable. Well, at least since Guillermo del Toro's fairy-insect infested Pan's Labyrinth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahoy!

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

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

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

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

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

and proportionally as long. You're welcome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned!

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

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

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