Margie Sarsfield's BETA VULGARIS

Elise fantasized about being the kind of adult she'd needed as a teenager, which felt a little pathetic, veering too close to "inner child" territory. Realistically, Elise could not be trusted with anyone's heart, not even her own.

Elise woke up with a thirst like she was a Russian doll and each of the selves inside her needed their own gallon of water to recover.

Elise had failed, miserably to learn every lesson, and she hated herself for it. She wanted to be the perfect person for everyone, and she'd never once gotten close. There were too many other fucked-up up versions of herself hanging out inside her, no room for the one true and flawless Elise to be born.

I don't think I've ever highlighted as many blocks of text in my ebook reader as I have in Margie Sarsfield's bizarre and brilliant novel, Beta Vulgaris, the chronicle of a young Millennial woman whose dreams of being able to support herself in a post-2008 United States mock her at every turn, and whose undergraduate education as a philosophy major and a lifetime of psycho-sexual anxiety and eating disorders have left her painfully and chronically self-aware, and whose current state of economic and social precarity has led her and live-in boyfriend Tom to the perfectly logical conclusion that their best move in the coming months is to leave their groovy Brooklyn life for a while, sublet their apartment to a friend/relative, and travel to faraway, exotic Minnesota and temporary employment as menial labor bringing in a massive and only sort-of industrialized sugar beet harvest. It pays really well, better than either of their current day jobs, and it should provide the kind of hipster credit and anecdote fodder beloved of their milieu, while also giving them a kind of rhetorical bludgeon to use on their elders, who just don't seem to understand just how dire their economic situation and prospects really are. And never mind that Tom is actually a trust fund baby who is getting ready to go to law school on his parents' dime. He's got his darned pride.

Elise, meanwhile, is generally struggling. The kind of struggling that she feels is unique to her age group but hey, I, too remember spending entire months walking six miles to and from work each day until my job decided to spring for monthly T passes for employees,and carefully rationing leaves off the head of lettuce that represented a week's groceries because I had stupidly splurged on a Ranma 1/2 VHS tape on pay day all those weeks ago, and having to pass up the really good temp jobs (before one of my temp jobs hired me as a permanent worker) because I couldn't afford the right clothes for the kind of office that would otherwise hire me based on my skills but not if I showed up in a fraying khaki skirt and a knit top that was beginning to pill because the dryers at my nearest coin-op laundry really sucked and [your own memory of twenty-something poverty here]. Elise's struggles have been my struggles, is what I'm saying, and if I'd had a groovy boyfriend with reliable cross-country transportation (aka a working car) when I was her age, I, too, might have chosen a season as a temporary agricultural worker of some kind. I might have made quite a few of the wacky choices (including, sometimes, choosing not to choose in the hope that a particular problem or two might just resolve itself or go away) she makes in the course of Beta Vulgaris. I might, too, have heard the sugar beets singing each to each, and thought that they were singing to me. Your mileage may vary.

Best Translated Book Nominees: Christos Iknonomou's GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA (translated by Karen Emmerich)

Blogger's note: this is my first read off the long list of books nominated for this year's Best Translated Book Award. I'm going to see how many of them I can read before the short list and eventual winner are announced. They all just sounded too interesting not to try out!

"Back then they sent people to the islands by force, now we come here on our own."

The four linked stories that comprise Christos Ikonomou's  Good Will Come From the Sea are set on a fictional Greek island that, like the rest of Greece (and the rest of the world), is still feeling the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, and of earthquakes that have been wrecking Athens. But that description, as bland as this book cover, doesn't begin to convey those impacts, which are not abstractly economical (though they are that, too) as much as they are very, very human, in the form of a new kind of migration pattern that proves the source of enough different kinds of agonizing tension to power many more than just these four excellent stories, and not just, as the pulled quote above conveys, because earlier in Greece's history the Aegean islands were where repressive governments sent uncooperative citizens to contemplate the error of their ways with a little help from jailers and torturers.

People who have lived on the island for generations witnessed that and let it form their society and grew accustomed to it, but now are suddenly having to deal with a new, semi-voluntary influx of people who, again, are just as Greek as they are, but because they come from Athens and grew up in higher socioeconomic classes above the natives' own, are referred to behind their backs and, in hostilities (which are many) to their faces as "Foreigners." The "Foreigners", in turn, refer to the natives as "Rats", perhaps alluding to the island's weird cave-riddled geography that the natives know intimately and the Athenians can barely navigate? If I'm being charitable here? Which nobody in these stories is, neither the Foreigners (not even, much, to each other) nor the Rats, all of whom are now trapped together by circumstances but none of whom are adjusting especially well.

All four stories are from the perspective of the in-migrants from Athens, who have left behind broken lives of relative privilege and prosperity and are still in shock but striving to rebuild in a new place... and finding it very, very difficult. Their prior values and cherished illusions are getting shown up as laughable and flimsy, they're facing real privation for the first time in their lives, and their support networks are disintegrated or diminished. They're still perservering, for now, but as each story opens, they're facing crises that may break them. And, I'll warn you right now, readers: don't come to these stories looking for happy endings or neat resolutions. Mysteries don't get solved. Resolutions may be fulfilled beyond the confines of a narrative but you don't get to see it.

But you do get to explore the interiority, and hidden resilience, of some very interesting characters as they struggle with the disappearance of loved ones, with vandalizing assaults on barely-started enterprises, with the question of the responsibility to act on knowledge they wish they didn't have about harm happening to a helpless other. As the protagonist of my favorite of the four, "Kill the German", a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs trying to blow up a sex shop and now uses mobility aids on an island not at all designed for his kind, observes to himself as he frets over the fate of a young girl pimped out by her family to a rich old man:

The world is constructed in such a way as to deprive each of us of the possibility of doing any personal good. No, that's not right. Let's take it from the top. Ready? Okay. The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We are all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else's affair.

We're all dealing with this right now especially, wherever we are in the world, eh? Only a lot of us have discovered that the government/social safety net/network of private charities we've always counted on to mitigate the sob stories the daily news brings us was never so robust as we thought, even in the free and prosperous West, and it maybe really is up to us to help each other out directly, even though we risk a lot in doing so.*

As we wring our hands at what the COVID-19 virus has done to and, more importantly, revealed about our world (though yeah, lots of us already knew from first-hand experience that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were very unevenly distributed), I feel like the characters, both Foreigners and Rats, from Ikonomou's stories would laugh at us, bitterly. Which is to say that these stories feel uncomfortably prophetic, especially for readers like me who live in remote places to which everybody else (*cough* Neil Gaiman *cough*) dream of or already have active plans for retreating, and have already seen the effects of decades in-migration by people who visited here once and decided to retire here but who are used to or demand "better" than what we have to offer, which is to say I was disposed to identify perhaps more with the Rats (none of whom really get developed as characters in these stories) than with the Foreigners, but Ikonomou is so damned good that he made me care about the Foreigners -- which is one of the big things that literature, that art, is for, isn't it?**

"If you're in need, if you are on the outside, you're a foreigner everywhere." another character observes. And your turn to be one might be next, is the not-so-subtle message here. So why not start being decent to one another now? Because here's the alternative, and it ain't pretty. 

So while these tales of people facing hostility, subterfuge, corruption, distrust, envy, sabotage, from people who are supposed to share the same culture as themselves, more or less, awaken empathy, they also are every bit as disturbing as any of, say, William Gibson's recent fictions of his post-Jackpot world.*** Passages observing the effect of long-term unemployment may soon come to feel a bit too familiar to a lot of people who have taken gainful work for granted , for instance. So I really can't decide if this is bad pandemic reading or good, but it's possibly the best pandemic reading? Because it is full of some sweet and amusing moments, too, like my favorite, which takes place in a new family-run taberna:

One of the ladies points at the light fixture on the ceiling. And the kid turns bright red and says no, no, no lamp, lamb, lamb, you know baaa, baaa. The old ladies start laughing and say okay okay and Petrus picks at the menus and comes over all in a huff and asks me who wrote the English menu.

And some frankly lovely prose, as when a man in search of his missing son (delivered into the employ of a shady local syndicate on his orders, no ifs ands or buts) pauses and observes the sea as he climbs to the top of the island's ridge to get a better look around: "The waves tipped with white like frothy eyebrows over the water's countless blind eyes" and wouldn't we all just kill to have sentences like that published under our names? And of course, how much of that is Ikonomou and how much is translator Karen Emmerich?

One bit that I think is mostly Emmerich comes as my paraplegic friend contemplates some old wisdom that I get from Jorge Luis Borges but think he probably got from Bishop Berkley or somebody, but phrased as succinctly and elegantly as I've yet seen in English: "Fathers and mirrors should be hated to an equal degree because they alone have the ability to make people multiply." Maybe it's really economical in the original Greek, too, but I'm thinking this is the translator's hand showing, gracefully.

So, as I said on Twitter the other day, if the rest of the books on the long list for Best Translated Book are anywhere near this good, I'm going to have an emotionally challenging but very satisfying set of reads ahead of me. Gimme!

*And, of course, in the U.S. and, it appears, the U.K. especially, we're also dealing with sizeable populations of people hell-bent on preventing us from helping each other, sometimes with the threat of deadly force.
**Not that my foreigners are going to be in quite the shape of these Athenian migrant-refugees, of course. I live in the Billionaire Wilderness.
***He seems to be buried in tweets whining to him that he predicted our current plight too damned well and maybe wasn't writing fiction but is some kind of pre-cog wizard. At least no one is mocking him for not foreseeing cellphones anymore?

Philip K. Dick's THE SOLAR LOTTERY

I usually get really, really annoyed by science fiction that posits a return to feudalism in our future -- it's even the bit in Frank Herbert's Dune series that I like the least -- but as I've grown older it's come to seem less ridiculous to me, especially when, as in Philip K. Dick's first published novel, The Solar Lottery, said feudalism is characterized not by dueling aristocrats but by the re-institution of serfs. As our own post-millennial economy continues to collapse and so many millions have been out of work for so long, those of us with jobs are terrified of losing them, however crappy they are, and so cling to them fearfully, and those of us without them grow ever more desperate, we're just steps away from the masses swearing oaths of personal fealty to big shots who promise magnanimously to protect them. I'm pretty sure the Koch Brothers and Donald Trump already have scribbler serfs drafting oaths for the masses, yo.

But the feudalism is just part of what's going on in this one; the socio-economic system of the human-colonized Solar system has devolved into a sort of government by game show/lottery, in which everyone who has managed to hold onto his "power card" has a chance every irregular interval of becoming the Quizmaster and the effective ruler of all nine planets (yes, that's counting Pluto; this book is from the late 1950s).

So of course as our story starts a new Quizmaster is chosen, but he might be a ringer: he's the head of a crackpot society who not only believe that there is a tenth planet out there but that they should colonize it, following their prophet out there. So nobody's happy that absolute power has fallen to him, least of all the former Quizmaster. But the moment has been prepared for: to keep truly unworthy rulers from ruining everything, a Challenge system exists whereby one assassin at a time is specially chosen to try to kill the new Quizmaster -- if the assassin can get past the corps of telepaths and other bodyguard types protecting the new Quizmaster that is.

But just as the new Quizmaster has a strange new agenda, the old one has been working against the day with the bottle spun around to replacing him. His plan is a doozy. Only a disgruntled newb in the ranks could foul things up. But of course there is one. Of course there is.

Meanwhile, an expedition launched to find and settle the tenth planet, Flame Disc, encounters weirdness as its crew tries to escape the insanity of the Solar Lottery. I would have like to have seen more of this subplot, which almost threatened to become a first contact story (and I would so love to see what PKD would do with that hoary old sci-fi chestnut!), but it was underserved, PKD more interested in the assassination and conflicting oaths going on back on good old Mother Earth. The result is still a good read, but not his best. Which is as it should be.

Philip K. Dick's IN MILTON LUMKY TERRITORY

So it might surprise folks that In Milton Lumky Territory, a very posthumously published piece of Philip K. Dick's literary fiction, is in many ways the strangest and most uncanny of his works I've ever read. Then again it might not; it's still Philip K. Dick, after all.

What makes it uncanny is the veneer of surreality -- if not unreality -- that the years have lain over its basic story of three characters whose neuroses get in the way of communicating, who are so worried about how they're coming across that they're not coming through. But it's not the characters or their strained, pained interactions (which are as beautifully and compellingly rendered as anything in highbrow White Male Narcissist literature) that make reading this novel so weird.

Its their world. Banal, ordinary, mundane, but also, through the action of time and economic upheaval, harder to believe could have ever been real than any Martian colony or post-apocalyptic California or urban techno-dystopia or tank full of humanoids engineered for another planet that Dick concocted.

In Milton Lumky Territory depicts an insignificant backwater in mid-century America, but its an America with a functioning manufacturing economy, in which it's quite possible for ordinary schmoes like PKD's typical barely competent boob-heroes to make a living, own a house, start or acquire a business, travel great distances by car just on the off-chance of maybe finding a warehouse full of newly-imported, as yet unknown and unmarketed Japanese typewriters* that can be bought cheap and sold in their downtown stores in places like Boise, Idaho not just for a profit but for enough to live on comfortably.

Fascinatingly and probably unintentionally also, In Milton Lumky Territory depicts the seeds of this economy's doom. One of the main characters, Bruce, starts off the novel working as a buyer for one of those newfangled discount houses, the ancestors to today's big box stores, before meeting Susan and letting himself be suckered into her dream of making something of her little two-bit typing and mimeographing business. There's also the aforementioned Japanese import typewriters Bruce is hankering to find and sell, the first wave of globalization and the downfall of an economy in which American businesses build durable and useful goods to be sold, used and repaired and used again in America.

It feels almost like PKD is taunting us, we who live in what can be argued is one version or another of his post-apocalyptic techno-dystopias he later created when he gave up on being a highbrow literary novelist and turned to science fiction and pulp to make his living. If only we'd been satisfied with what we had back then, maybe we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. We could have lived in this novel, but instead, we had to break things and ruin things, let in globalization and inflation and deregulation and union-busting and general plutocracy.

But all this is just rich modern subtext to the experience of reading In Milton Lumky Territory. There is also the actual story, a soap opera plot in which Bruce and Susan meet (again**) and sort of back into deciding they're in love and should marry their fortunes together and encounter the title character, Milton Lumky, who is a traveling typewriter and typing supplies salesman (that there could be such a profession!), only to alienate him and then belatedly find they need him, for he perhaps holds the secret to finding the golden opportunity of Bruce's theoretical warehouse full of languishing game-changing Japanese machines. The characters' interactions bristle with tension, with misunderstanding, with neuroses, with the drama of miscommunication and buried intentions and revelations that seem more than a little creepy.

Which is to say that so many of the things we read PKD for are here, one does not miss the spaceships or the aliens or the revelation that the president is a robot.

I know this world existed once. My parents have vivid memories of it and I trust their accounts. Its relics can still be found all around us (myself, I have three wonderful old manual typewriters, one from 1926, that all still work beautifully because they've been lovingly cared for and used well and kindly over the years by people who respected them and expected them to last). Those empty storefronts in your city's downtown used to be occupied by businesses like Susan's; those factory buildings weren't always chic yuppie loft condos.

It's a lost world, and it's our own decisions, not a comet from space or a machine uprising or a nuclear misunderstanding that lost it for us. And that makes this the most poignant PKD of all.

*Dude. Typewriter fetishists take note. This story is about people who buy and sell and repair typewriters and paper and ribbons and carbons, and they talk about them a lot. It's pretty much heaven.

**Their original meeting lends all this a soap opera sudsiness that is good for too many guffaws to spoil here.