Bao Ninh's THE SORROW OF WAR (Tr Frank Palmos & Phan Thanh Hao, Narr James Langton)

Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling.

I've known more than a few United States veterans of the Vietnam War, listened to them talk about survivors' guilt and how that can color absolutely every aspect of their post-war lives, and that's hard enough for me to imagine -- but what if you were also living out that life in the same territory where you took your wounds, watched your buddies and rivals die? Which was also where you grew up, first fell in love, buried your grandparents or parents? Comparing these experiences is, of course, pointless. So I won't say one is worse than another, but, well, the most emotionally harrowing parts of the only novel I've read about this war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, take place on former battlefields long after the Yanks went home.

Our point of view character, Kien, has, like Bao Ninh himself, finally concluded, after years of failing to re-integrate into daily life in his home city, the much-revived and gentrified Hanoi, that the only real reason he has been forced,  by circumstance and conscience, to carry on, is to record his experiences for posterity. And so he has done, and is doing, for The Sorrow of War isn't just about his experiences of preparation, combat and aftermath, but also of remembering and writing what will essentially become this very novel. The one can be as harrowing as the other, as anyone with PTSD* can tell you. And as difficult to convey in words!

The Sorrow of War, like Slaughterhouse Five, pulls its narrator character unstuck from time, though without any of the (possibly imaginary) relief of S5's science fictional frame narrative. We see Kien on an MIA detail, retrieving bodies after hostilities have ended, in various medical camps recovering from injuries, taking damage from explosions of buildings, trains, planes overhead, with his childhood sweetheart as a teenager, misunderstanding his father as an even younger teen, rescuing one woman from assault and likely rape, failing to rescue another one, encountering still another woman he last saw as a worshipful little girl watching him bravely march off to war with her adored big brother only to find her forced into prostitution as an adult... and Bao Ninh via Kien is there to make sure we feel every second of Kien's pain, guilt, concern, helplessness, rage, love, fear, disappointment and, yes, immaturity and emotional stuntedness. War forces one to grow up too fast in some ways, and stops him from growing up at all in others. We do not see Kien's attitude about women evolve much beyond what it was when he was rolling around in the grass with his gorgeous first love at the age of 17. But he learns every other lesson imaginable, and doesn't shy from showing us that even from his perspective as a lonely middle aged man, he still has some growing to do.

All of this is conveyed with considerable introspection and tenderness by narrator James Langton, whose voice I associate more with the colder and more empirical narratives of science fiction writers like Adam Roberts than with the emotional scenes this book demanded. I mean to say, here, that Langton would not have been my choice for The Sorrow of War but that I would have been wrong. He hits the right note every scene, and even when he sounds like he's at his most detached, still also manages to sneak in subtle hints that it's all an act. I still think I would have rather read this one in print, but I'm poor and my beloved public library only has the audio edition, so that's what I got -- but I did not suffer for it. At least, not in terms of quality.

I suffered in lots of other ways, of course. All of them the ways that fiction intends. And I also got to visit, in my minds eye and through the beautiful words of Bao Ninh, Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao, a beautiful country that I'll never see with the eyes of my body -- at both its best and its worst. Wow.

*And to this I can relate, in my different but still pretty fucking intense way. 

Amanda Michalopoulou's WHY I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND (Tr Karen Emmerich)

We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals. We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.

No, that's not a quote from Renee Good, dead only a week as I type this, but it sure could be, couldn't it? It's from a Greek novel, originally written in 2003, translated and published in English (by good old Open Letter) in 2014. History doesn't only rhyme with itself. Sometimes it rhymes with literature, too.

As the title of Amanda Michalopoulou's tense and affecting novel of odiasamato (we'll get to that), Why I Killed My Best Friend, the course of true love, or at least friendship, never did run very smooth, and while this story concerns two very cosmopolitan Greek women who effortlessly shuttle from Nigeria to Greece to France and around again, it's a book that I, a shut-in living in the landlocked and isolated heart of North America, found a lot within that spoke to me, and not just because I'm basically the same age as protagonist Maria and her titular bestie, Anna.

I, too, grew up with a best friend (though I called another that at the time) for whom I had feelings as strongly hostile as admiring. More than one, actually; my original frienemy, whose mother looked after both my sister and I after school during our elementary years ,moved away just before middle school, leaving me to drift into an almost identically toxic relationship before sixth grade was even halfway over. There's a reason I gnash my teeth at Margaret Atwood's doormat protagonists, who never quite manage to rebel against their more charismatic and domineering friends, only escaping at best, usually only to be re-ensnared later in life when the toxicity has only increased. I'm in this image and I don't like it. 

Such a fate looms ever larger for Maria, whose entanglement with the exquisite Anna begins soon after she is taken away from her childhood home in Nigeria (where her exiled Greek expat parents lived comfortably expat lives doing something bourgeois for a living) back to her family's native Athens. At first Maria feels unwelcome and singled out for misery: her classmates hate her. But then a newer new girl joins the class, also the child of returned exiles, but their return is from glamorous, sophisticated Paris, rather than primitive and mysterious Africa. Still, the girls' shared status as outcasts gives them a reason to bond, at least after they clear up a slight misunderstanding about whether or not Maria's parents were nasty, racist,  colonial oppressors. They weren't (or, at least, not exactly); friendship saved. 

Though this is far from the only misunderstanding that will threaten this pairing over the decades. 

For these two girls' families were not expats on a whim, like their American counterparts would be; their parents are leftists who fled into exile in the 70s rather than suffer, or even be killed, under the rule of the Greek Junta aka the Regime of the Colonels.* Anna's father is a famous philosopher, and her mother a ballet dancer, for instance. Maria's parents' leftist bona fides are a little less apparent -- her dad works for an oil company and her mom is kind of a socialite -- but at least they were very kind to their black live-in help, especially Maria's nanny, Gwendolyn, whom in true colonial fashion Maria thought was her actual mother for a while there.

I bring up all this political background because it's actually to the fore in this novel; indeed, it could be debated whether WIKMBF is a coming-of-age story with political characteristics, or a political story with coming-of-age characteristics. Anna has absolutely been raised on leftist politics and doesn't know how not to bring them up in every conversation, even as an angelic looking little nine-year-old new girl who is absolutely ready to judge her desk-mate as just another superficial right wing pigeon from outer space (IYKYK), while Maria is decidedly less so but willing to be influenced, falling under the spell of glamorous Antigone, Anna's mother, and very disappointed when her own mother won't join the consciousness-raising group Antigone is trying to put together before she and her daughter have even finished moving into their pretty house.

So of course the girls are soon competing with each other over who's the most doctrinaire leftist, who has the best ideas for incorporating good politics into their childish art projects at school, who's going to do greater and more important things when they grow up, and whose mother loves whom more. And yes, eventually the girls' fathers become part of the story, but never a very big part; just enough for us to see that Anna's future husband will be a carbon copy of dear old dad, and for us to see just how much Maria's mother has diminished herself to keep Maria's father happy, giving Maria a negative model of femininity to measure herself against as she goes on to live the life of a bohemian art student and political activist, i.e. neither a wife nor a mother.

And of course they spend some time in young adulthood accusing each other of insincerity, of doubting each other's commitment and effectiveness, while still joyfully reuniting and professing eternal love and best friendship... and Maria watching the prettier and more confident Anna steal pretty much every man Maria has ever had a crush on (and one or two of the women). Friendships as close as this only lack these aspects when there is neither a political nor sexual dimension to the friends' lives, like pretty much no friendship ever.

Someday, if I manage to figure out the why and the how, I'll write a novel. I'll tell the whole story, all that we lived through, from my point of view. I'll let Anna have the title, though: Why I Killed My Best Friend.  If you don't feel like reading it, the cover will be enough, you can skip the story: one friend kills another, big deal, human beings are killing one another every day all over the world. Sometimes, to give a logical structure to these conflicts, they fight body to body, hand to hand with the police. Or they fall down the stairs in a metro station without ever having been pushed. They'll even fight themselves, if there's no other worthy opponent around.

"Odiosamato" is the word Maria uses to name her relationship with Anna. I'm no scholar of Greek, ancient or modern, but I think our modern English slang "frienemy" works well enough for it, though I'm pretty sure the Greek, combining "love" and "hate" rather than the somewhat more tepid "friend" and "enemy",  deserves to remain in the translated text as it does. As we learn in a translator's note at the end, Karen Emmerich was able to work fairly closely with Michalopoulou on the translation, and Michalopoulou took this opportunity to revise the original a bit. As Emmerich observes, "Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translator's usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda's consent and involvement." I'm not one of those readers familiar with the Greek, but their keeping of "odiosamato" signals very strongly to me how carefully this work was prepared. As a certain gigantic publisher odiously prepares to end its relationship with translators in favor of letting large language models do it instead, I want here to take a stand against it and in gratitude to the work that only human beings can do with the care and skill and sensitivity required. 

But so, the question you're probably asking in your head as I blather about this book is, does Maria actually kill her best friend? But you know me by now; I'm going to tell you to read the damned book. It's an international hit for a reason (and not just for its hints of good praxis, my favorite of which is bringing rainsticks to protests, "which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police"), and it's not just for the unflinching honesty with which it portrays female friendship at its most troublesome. 

I'm pinching myself for letting this book languish in my ebook library for as long as it did; had I gotten it in a physical edition its various lurid and eye-catching covers would have made it stand out on my shelf, I think. But better late than never, and sometimes, best of all is right now.

*A situation I only just learned of through reading this book. I swear I didn't choose to read this in January 2026 because its background dictatorship reminds me of anything chilly going on right now. Regardless of what the conspirituality types keep insisting, there is such a thing as coincidence. I just wanted to read more contemporary Greek literature, and did my usual trick of going bananas when Open Letter had one of its sales. Which, if you're reading this right when I've posted it, they've got one going on right now. Go bananas! Or baklavas, if you prefer. 

Jenny Hval's GIRLS AGAINST GOD (Tr Marjam Idriss; Narr Gabrielle Baker)

No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means i'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.

The unnamed narrator of Girls Against God, Norwegian Renaissance woman Jenny Hval's second novel to be translated into English, first takes us back to 1992, when she is a chronological latecomer to the heyday of the Norwegian black metal music scene. She invites us to look with, not compassion but comprehension, at her younger self standing apart in the back of the crowd at a show, dressed in black with dyed black hair, looking on from the vantage of "The gloomiest child queen."

We don't get to spend much time in this teenagers' court, though (yes, I mean to use the plural possessive here. You think there's only one child queen at this show? There are plenty. We're just called to observe the gloomiest one. And yes, I'm being extra fussy about language and usage here. As my queen demands), before we follow our heroine into high achieving yet frustrated adulthood, with a magisterial will, a titanic ambition, a talent to match, a haughty disdain for us lesser beings, and, yes, a hate, which she still feels powerless to enact and express, still trapped in a small and frail-looking and easily sexualized body.

But underestimate this fragile looking young woman at your peril. Her advanced degrees are in the 20th and 21st century art of film and video, but her soul and her desire and her power come from friendship and sisterhood and other older and deeper and wilder arts -- and maybe even the craft usually denigrated with a prefix of "witch-."

But instead of a coven, burning candles and calling down the moon and making stinky tisanes (though there's a fair amount of all of that, too), she forms a band with two friends, Venka and Terese, and here's the part where I link to any of Jenny Hval's stunning music videos for her unique and haunting and powerful songs and song-like compositions. Except I can't choose. Partly because I'm a neophyte (if a 55-year-old woman in her twelfth goddamned year of perimenopause can still be called a neophyte in any way) in terms of Jenny Hval's art. It's all hitting me at once. I'd only barely heard of her as a name from an episode in the back catalog of one of my favorite podcasts -- and those folks generally like way heavier music than I do so I hadn't gotten around to that one yet when I saw it was about a musician who, at the time, had written her first novel*. I'll get to it one of these days maybe, I said. But so my point is, you can probably pick a place to start with Hval's other art as well as or better than I can. Go. Explore. But not yet. Because I want to talk about this amazing fucking book about a goddamned metal music witch coven and their adventures with the poor, exploited, overexposed young girl depicted in Edvard Munch's Puberty -- and, via the expressionist surrealist whateverist magic of fictional time travel, the Scream painter himself.

But so, think for a moment what it must have been like to grow up as a tiny blonde girl in 1990s Norway (specifically southern Norway, a distinction that is lost on me but that I feel after reading this book like it might not be utterly dissimilar to the United States' own South vis-a-vis the rest of Norway, in a way?), surrounded, as our Hval stand-in complains bitterly (and narrator Gabrielle Baker lets us feel every vibration of the eyerolls that accompany Hval's speeches from her character's gloomiest child queen's perspective, as well as the adult's slowly growing anger, chilling patience, and diabolical creativity as she unleashes the art of her spells, or the spells of her art, on the dominant and still very narrowly Christian culture that keeps trying to trap her and her bandmate-sisters within its narrow limits on femininity) the same pious yet aggressive, destructive and vicious attitudes that the young males among her contemporaries attacked with unreadable band logos, corpse paint, body odor, sick guitar riffs and, oh yeah, church burnings.

All that looks like childish tantrum-throwing to her. She wants to do something that matters, not to the teen boys screaming from her mix tapes of yesteryear or the prison inmates they became, nor to the greater culture that made the boys and the girls feel so trapped, but to herself and her girls. Who hate God.

"For a brief moment, the Norns have surfaced," she says, as her band and their fans turn the decaying former site of the Munch Museum in Oslo into their own installation, replete with water damage, faded spots on the wall in place of faded paintings, blood-red graffiti and badly 3D-printed plastic babies. Or at least parts of them. Does that sound a bit lame? Well, it's just the sound check.

Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too).

GaG is also a bit of a cyberpunk story, and not just because the band-coven could very easily have accomplished one of their highly effective rituals with a Flipper Zero. Though they totally could have. Except Flipper Zeros weren't really a thing yet when this novel was written. So, more than a bit cyberpunk, as the band members fuse deep web searches with chaos-magical something-or-others and joke about just using "witch ritual" as a search term and hitting "I feel lucky" and imagine "information streaming through the arteries" of their wrists. Pretending to use something like the internet back when computers were still exotic but unconnected was, our heroine realizes, her first ritual, an exercise in sending forth her will through "the cosmic internet.

I'm tempted to go on quoting from this novel, to go on enjoying the sometimes sweeping, sometimes transfixing, power of Hval's and translator Marjam Idriss' language, which so often sounds more like a Jimi Hendrix lyric than a narrative, as you've perhaps already noticed. Jimi was pretty in touch with his feminine side, I think. 

But so, that's one of the miracles of this book: even while the intense and implacable longing for feminine power and agency engulfs the text completely, it's never at the expense of men or boys. Even the humorless, pretentious black metal boys of yesteryear, and their more conventionally loutish counterparts who drive big junky cars through quiet Norwegian villages at top speed and volume, just to be disruptive, earn Hval's admiration, never her scorn. Even Edvard Munch, he of the Puberty painting that the band-members work passionately to separate from its subject so she can be free, gets off pretty lightly, to say nothing of the anonymous creator of a certain infamous and pornographic Japanese woodcut you'll have to read the book to find and identify. Hval engages in a fair amount of trenchant but never weaponized art criticism in these pages, too, but always with a positive goal even as she emphasizes that her greatest power is her hatred. But what she hates is never an individual or even a category of people. She hates forces, especially those that threaten her cherished values of freedom, agency, strength, expression -- these are none of them zero sum games, is the takeaway from this novel. And fuck anybody who insists otherwise.

Unless you're playing the aforementioned games against God.

The gloomiest child queen is my queen, too. She's a pretty good one. I stan.

*Girls Against God is, I think, Hval's third, though only her second to be translated into English? Or something like that? According to Wikipedia the other day? Which, do we still trust Wikipedia? My instinct says yes, but consider the demographic I copped to above.

Jazmina Barrera's THE QUEEN OF SWORDS (Tr Christina Mac Sweeney)

The Queen of Swords, Jazmina Barrera's fascinating and unusual study of Mexican literary icon Elena Garro, might get shelved among the literary biographies in the rare and special kind of bookstore that will even bother to stock such a thing, as a rule, but The Queen of Swords is about as much a biography as Orson Welles' incredible F for Fake is a documentary. Which is to say both "kind of" and "not at all.*"

Furthermore, in arguing for the "kind of" side I would have to invoke the parallel or tandem biography, like Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, which simultaneously studies Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, while also giving considerable time to each Mary's equally-if-not-more famous husbands. Elena Garro's daughter is nowhere near as big a presence in QoS as Elena herself, but the child's father, Elena's famous husband Octavio Paz, takes up the space that Helenita doesn't, while Barrera's surprisingly entertaining experiences of researching and writing the book also shares the space, kind of the way some of Orson Welles' hijinks round out F for Fake. 

Moreover, both projects are complete delights, marred only by their (by modern standards) brevity -- though by saying they're "marred" implies that this is a flaw when it only really highlights the fact that they left me wanting much, much more.**

But there's no equivalent, in QoS, to the famous Chartes sequence in FfF. Barrera's work is much too intimate and personal to yield a big meditation on art and history and architecture. And Garro's life was a lot more harrowing than Welles'; several times she and her daughter were fleeing entire countries ahead of assassins, possibly vindictive ex-lovers, political authorities and penury. And Barrera has only the medium of text to convey all of this. But what text she has!

What we conserve of the dead is, above all, images and words: in that they are similar to books. We might even make the mistake of confusing the two, but no life fits in a single book. It would need several trunks, whole libraries, university and press archives to hold the vast, elusive life of Elena Garro, and what I write here doesn't aspire to that. It doesn't pretend to have the last word on anything or anybody. This isn't a biography, it's scarcely a notebook. It is a collection of stories, ideas, facts, and cats.

Garro was a woman who deeply loved the idea, if not the fact, of divinatory arts like the I Ching and the Tarot -- hence the incredible cover Two Lines Press generated for the English language edition of QoS, which takes the same iconic photo of Garro that graces the original and abstracts it into a version of a card of the Minor Arcana. Amusingly, the text itself is divided into very short chapters, some only a sentence or two long, each with a pithy title that could almost be the name of one of the Major Arcana, like "THE CRIME OF FANTASY" or "PERFUME," such that I had a working theory while reading the book that there was one chapter for each card in the Tarot. Alas, when I actually sat down to count the chapter-ettes, I got far more than the expected 78. It was still a fun theory, and while I have zero evidence that this idea was ever part of Barrera's plan for QoS, I respect that if it was, such a gimmick was not allowed to govern the presentation. Barrera's short, specific chapters (which, further arguing against the idea that this is in any way a biography, are not remotely chronological; they are firmly grouped by ideas according to a scheme that I couldn't really parse out but didn't really try because the text is far more interesting than the structure), which quote liberally from Garro's own works and those of her contemporaries, also present the reader with a pleasing run of meta-knowledge in the form of marginalia clearly identifying the precise source for its quotations, a technique I find that I much prefer to footnotes or endnotes and one that I wouldn't mind seeing catch on with other writers who are bridging the gulf between the scholarly work of formal criticism and the popular biographical one.

I've dreamed of Elena Garro a number of times and almost all those dreams have left me with brief, inconclusive pictures: a blurred image of Elena standing up, wearing a coffeee-colored, tailored suit; Elena Garro and Bioy Casares laughing at something awful, with Octavio Paz looking worried. I once dreamed that Elena entered a worm spiral of time and space that carried her from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Another night, I dreamed that Elena and Helenita were Lorelai and Rory from the television series Gilmore Girls.

Elena Garro is a brand new discovery for me. I had of course heard of her husband, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, but, to be honest, Latin American, and especially Mexican, literature is still a bit of a blind spot for me. I have read more fiction translated from various dialects of Arabic than I have from Spanish, more from the Austrian Hapsburg empire than from Spain's. Ernest Hogan, Alejandro Morales, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (does she count since she's actually a Canadian citizen?)... so I've read some weird fiction from Mexico, sure, but not any literary or mainstream stuff... and then I find that Elena Garro is at least as responsible as more familiar-to-me creators like Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the development of Magical Realism, especially in its stricter definition in which the source for the magical is Indigenous folk legend and belief***. But so anyway, I came into QoS as cold as cold could be, and leave it now determined to make up for lost time with Elena Garro. How fortunate, therefore, that my brand shiny new subscription/membership to the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press brought me, not only QoS, but also The Week of Colors, a collection of Garro's short fiction originally published in 1964 and newly translated into English by Megan McDowell. It's like these people want to make it easy for me to fall in love, or something.

I will probably never love Garro as much as Jazmina Barrera does, though. As she shares in the course of the book, QoS started out as an essay for a journal, but as Barrera, whose own great-grandparents were friends of Garro and Paz, got access to loads of archival material and re-read Garro's works for the umpteenth time, her love became all consuming until the project swallowed up all of her time and effort and became this wonderful book. I'm grateful for this love and for the fact that it is still possible, at least for a very few of us, for people with a passion to pursue it fully and come out with something this terrific to show for it. Let's hear it for adventurous editors, curious scholars, and prolific playwrights/poets/novelists. This world would sure suck without them.

*And if I had to compare it to anything besides FfF, it would have to be to something like Michel Houellebecq's "literary mash note" H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, though QoS has an entirely different tone.

**And just as FfF led me down multiple rabbit holes of wrong and crazy awesome about Elmyr de Heury and Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes, well, let's just say that I'm already falling past the levitating rocking chairs and apothecary shelves and bookcases on my way down to exploring Elena Garro's (and friends') literary wonderland, starting with a newly released translation of Garro's The Week of Colors published in tandem with QoS, just to make sure I did so.

***And in these pages I learned that one of the many reasons why authority figures of various kinds did not appreciate the treasure they had in Elena Garro was her consistent and lifelong support of Indigenous rights (and, of course, her very vocal and active support of revolutionaries in general), entitling Garro to even more of my admiration than her literary output already demands.

Mathias Énard's THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS GUILD (Tr Frank Wynne)

I never realized, before plunging into the fray of Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, that a work of fiction could have terroir. This is not the kind of sentence I ever imagined myself writing, or taking such pleasure in having written, but it's the best way to describe this novel, at least insofar as I understand the concept I'm evoking here. 

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, hereinafter referred to by your lazy blogger as TABotGG, teems with the kind of rural characters that a reader might will be terribly romanticized -- but stubbornly refuse to be, who persist in their Rabelaisian crudity (the works of François Rabelais, and of François Villon, echo throughout this text even before the title scene begins quoting these guys outright) and gossiping ways as our main point of view character struggles to document their way of life for his anthropology dissertation, all while realizing that he doesn't really even understand his own. 

David Mazon, late of the academic world of Paris, has done field work before, but this time he's really got to dig into his subject and get his hands dirty (beyond his futile battle with the weird red worms infesting the bathroom of the hut he's renting from a local farming couple). But of course, like most academic fish-out-of-water types, he's realizing that his course of study and lack of experience outside of studenthood hasn't even prepared him to research well. He spends most of his time playing with the farm cats who adopt him, and playing Tetris, at least at first.

So,  TABotGG could easily fall into cliché and bore us to tears as yet another supposed sophisticate finally learns about real life from colorful locals -- but it never does. We get a certain amount of arrogant bumbling on David's part, and of deserved comeuppance, but Énard is much more interested in pulling us deep into the soil and its produce here, avoiding also the tiredness of bewailing how every particle of dirt in Europe has passed through innumerable human bodies over the centuries, Europe is a bone heap, etc: Énard is here, instead, to celebrate this. And, in the process, to hint rather gently at the responsibilities of stewardship these facts impose on the agricultural communities who have made all of this possible. But only gently. No preachy environmental polemics here!

Instead, as we follow David through his rounds of interviews and tours and trying of his hand at the odd farm chore -- and David turns out himself to have quite a bit of character, as we see early in his story when a winter storm knocks out power to the village and he resorts to stealing candles from a church for the benefit of a near stranger who is stranger than he knows (we'll get to Arnaud -- oh, Arnaud! -- in a moment) -- we are invited to feel the course of waters through the soil and the decomposition of bodies, and the nutrient cycle, but, again, without being lectured about it. 

Meanwhile, we get to know lots and lots of characters, and not just in their current incarnations; we're a bit in Eastern philosophical territory here, as, upon a character's ordinary or dramatic or untimely or actually pretty funny death, we follow his or her soul, unstuck in time but very much confined to this geography, through karmic cycles of lives as people and animals of other eras in the region. For instance, David's wormy nemeses have human stories, too.

This is best explored through the character of Arnaud, whom we first come to know as the poor, neurodivergent young man whom the locals think is fun to get drunk and make him do his one seeming party trick of being able to rattle off a historical precis of everything of significance that ever happened on a particular date. We learn later in the book that there's much more to this seeming fixation and... look, I would read a whole book just about Arnaud. Arnaud is the best. But this is a book about a banquet, according to the title, right? A banquet held by the people who start up the process of converting the meat puppets we walk around in for a few decades, back into soil.

And these guys know how to party.

"...as was his wont, he filled the glass to the ringing brim until the surface of the wine was slightly convex, which he checked, stealthily approaching the glass with the wiles of a Sioux warrior, chin resting on the tablecloth, as though the precious liquid must be caught unawares before it should flee: once again Martial Pouvreau managed to ambush the wine’s meniscus; with pursed lips and an inhuman slurping noise, he drank off a good two centimeters of Chinon in a single draft before lifting his glass by the foot, with airy insouciance."

Oh, the banquet scene, the novel's capstone and center and longest (and most exhausting) chapter by far. I initially complained a bit about it to a few of my book-nerdiest friends, who all agreed that it's a bit much and a major tonal shift that can feel out of place. It is, however, the title scene, in which a hundred or so funerary professionals from all around the greater area of western France (or it might be the nation, excluding those from the cities?) come together for three days to discuss business a little and eat and drink a lot. Traditionally, these three days are a time when no one dies so that the gravediggers and cemetery caretakers and embalmers and hearse drivers and whatnot can let their hair down, and boy do they ever. We are treated to careful and meticulous details about everything they eat and drink, to their shop talk as they guzzle, and to their over-the-top feats of public speaking in which they quote and paraphrase France's earthiest literary figures.

“Of a sudden, darkness fell upon the battlefield below. 

“‘Gendarme, an eclipse! The darkest shadow has surprised our armies!’ 

“‘Not so, Commander, ’tis the giant’s schlong that blots out Phoebus! His tumescent pork sword is big as a billboard!'"

Which brings me to translator Frank Wynne, one of the greatest to ever do it, and who had his work cut out for him in rendering many versions of spoken and written French, prose and poetry, into something like their equivalents in English; as he shares in a terrific translator's note at the end, for instance, he  cleverly resorted to rendering one character's outré and vaguely archaic dialect... as Scots. 

It totally works, by the way. In a scene in which a judge is struggling to understand her testimony in court, even with the help of a local "interpreter."

But so, this isn't, like, Doc Martin  (for all that I could see Martin and many of the other residents of Port Wenn at work and play here) but a French novel by the same guy who sent Michaelangelo on an imaginary sojourn in the Ottoman Empire; trigger warnings galore, here. There are bawdy and sometimes gross jokes. There is a very vivid description of rape and its aftermath. There is cruelty and negligence and lots of talk of creepy crawlies and rotting corpses and inept gunplay and cheerfully lusty sex. But there's also a nice love story or two and many depictions of healthy marriages and friendships and fellowship and good food and well-turned earth. 

Basically, TABofGG is a hefty French novel about hobbits. It's a book I didn't even know I needed, but find that I most certainly did. From now on, whenever I contemplate the Shire, I shall not imagine them with those rich English countryside accents, but robust and fruity French ones, starring Gerard Depardieu as Bilbo Baggins and Romain Duris as Frodo. Your mileage may vary. But I think you'll have more fun if you do. Give it a try, non?

Andreas Eschbach's THE CARPET MAKERS (Tr by Doryl Jensen)

Andreas Eschbach has not been on my radar before now, but I'm determined to make up for all the time I've missed knowing his work, for if The Carpet Makers, his mid-90s pseudo-medieval space opera stunner that seems only to have finally gotten translated into English because of Orson Scott Card,* is anything to go by, I'm going to need to read everything of his I possibly can, and may even have finally to try learning German so I don't have to wait around for translators. Yeah, it's that good.

The pseudo-medieval element turns out, of course, to be a bit of a red herring, for while the story starts in a very low-tech, materially impoverished and superstitious society, we soon learn that it is but one of many planets, star systems, even galaxies that, along with the rest of known space/humanity, exists under the rule and on the sufferance of a far-away Galactic Empire. Which empire is ruled by an absolute monarch everyone worships as a god, believes to be immortal and omnipotent, and demands a very peculiar form of tribute from the planet where our story starts: carpets that are elaborately and intricately hand-knotted from human hair.

Creating these carpets is the sole driver of economic activity on this planet, which has a very rudimentary government and civil society and trading network, all in service of bringing thousands of these exquisite handicrafts to the planet's Port City every year for transport off-world to, they have always understood, decorate the Emperor's palace. Which must be very, very large and very, very fancy to even have room for all of the carpets they have been sending over tens of thousands of years.

A special class of artisans makes these carpets, which are about the size of a nice area rug, very, very slowly and very, very precisely. The culture of these artisans is one of generational obligation and strict hereditary status and privilege, in which a carpet maker, upon reaching manhood, is presented with a money chest meant to support him and his entire family over his entire life, the proceeds from the sale of his father's sole produce, one single, perfect carpet, created over the father's entire lifetime, knotted from the hair of the elder carpet maker's wives and daughters. Each carpet maker can only have a single son which he raises to adulthood, but unlimited daughters. If additional boys are born to any of the carpet maker's wives, the carpet maker must kill the infants (we get rather a shocking incidence of this to kick off the book). His daughters provide what raw material his wives don't, wives being chosen chiefly for the quality and natural color of their hair; ideally each carpet maker has at least one black-haired, one brown-haired, one red-haired and one blonde wife.

The son of the carpet maker, who will become a carpet maker himself, thus begins his career benefiting from a debt to his father that he can never repay; his father has worked his entire lifetime to make and sell a single carpet, for which he will be paid enough to keep his son and daughters-in-law in housing and food and chattels for the new carpet maker's entire career, until the son in turn finishes and sells a carpet, the proceeds of which will support the next generation of his line.

Once a year, a vast caravan completes an even vaster circuit of a large swathe of the planet, collecting that year's supply of newly-completed carpets and bringing them to the Port City, to be taken away by increasingly decrepit starships piloted and crewed by conscripted citizens of the planet, who have learned to fly by rote and have no idea how to repair or maintain the ships beyond the basics of flying them. Their cargo is thousands of carpets, whisked away once a year.

The entire rest of the planet works to provide basic material support for the carpet makers' families and the "shipsmen" who crew the creaky old transport vessels. The only form of culture we learn of is a weird and fascinating musical tradition of playing something referred to as a "triflute" -- a musical instrument that comprises three wind instruments twisted into one and deftly manipulated by the talented player, who is the only form of actually skilled class that exists apart from the carpet makers'. I found this sub-culture more interesting than the carpet makers' (of course I did) and a sub-plot involving a child prodigy at the triflute being conscripted to become a shipsman instead of continuing to develop his talent greatly enriches the novel but is not allowed to develop as the parallel story it should have been, ultimately kind of going nowhere except to create a red herring in the main plot, which I'll get to in a moment.

But so, the DNA of this novel is pretty evident and distinguished: the craft-as-sacrifice and service element of the Bright Carvings of the first Gormenghast novel, spliced in with a Galactic Empire that owes more to, say, God Emperor of Dune than to the Foundation series, but with a greater sense of mystery than either of these settings have to offer. What is being done with all of these carpets when they reach their destination? How did this weird tradition start, and why does it continue? What kind of weirdo demands millions and millions of carpets made out of human hair as tribute from a distant, conquered world?

Unlike a lot of the books I tend to gravitate toward, The Carpet Makers does answer all of these questions; we do get to observe bits of the greater empire, which has undergone considerable upheaval in the time it has taken one man back on Carpet Planet (we never do get an actual name for this planet) to perform his life's work. There has at least been a rebellion, and the Emperor has been proven to be less immortal than everybody thought, for all that he has provably lived and reigned for over a hundred thousand years. The Rebellion that took him out is struggling to assemble a government that is not just another absolute monarchy, but faces the threat of a new emperor arising in the person of the hero who murdered the old one and enjoys considerable prestige and adoration among the populace of the imperial planet and the worlds close to the former empire's center.

And there's one other thing: there's not a carpet in sight, for all that the palace is more than big enough to accommodate quite a lot of them.

And no one at the empire's core has ever heard of the Carpet Planet or its produce, until a scouting expedition stumbles upon it and a disobedient member of the crew decides to land on it and look around and maybe spread the word that the empire is no more. Which is, of course, heresy on that planet. Uh oh.

Another sub-sub-plot (this is a big picture novel rather than a character study; I couldn't tell you the name of a single person in it. We just get sketched-in stories, told briskly in individual chapters and then never visited again) involves the empire's staggeringly huge and complex archives, which have been re-organized so many times over millions of years (the emperor that was recently offed was the tenth of this empire, and it's implied that most of his predecessors were also functionally immortal) that almost nobody knows how far back in time the records go, let alone what's in them all. A laughably small team has been assigned by the new government to find out what they can about a number of questions, including why this weirdo Carpet Planet claims it's been sending carpets to decorate the palace for millennia -- and why, although this weird planet's inhabitants are absolutely certain that they are the only such planet, exploratory teams out in the far reaches of space have discovered that the whole galaxy (one of many ruled by this empire) which contains the Carpet Planet also contains tens of thousands of other Carpet Planets with identical cultures and missions!

All of these wild ideas and intricate plots are rendered by translator Doryl Jensen into some pretty exquisite prose, with an emphasis on describing scenes of dreary beauty and not a little pathos:

The narrow street was still sleeping. A light early-morning fog hung suspended between the squat gables and was mixed with cold smoke from hearths in which the fires had gone out in the night. When the first Sundays flicked across the roof ridges of the crooked little houses, everything seemed bathed in an inappropriately dreamy and delicately misty light. Like little piles of dirt, beggars lay in some dark corners, sleeping on the bare ground, ragged blankets twisted up over their heads.

As I said, we do get a solution to the mysteries posed, which is, by the way, devastating. It doesn't quite demand a complete re-read of the prior text, but it will change the way you've been thinking about the carpet makers, their world, the empire they serve, and the myriad ways giving any one guy absolute power is a very bad idea.

And so I find myself in the position of owing a debt of gratitude to, of all people, Orson Scott Card, who used his clout to get this amazing novel translated into English and published by Tor. I'm still pretty annoyed with the man, but there you go. We are complicated creatures.

And now, I'm off to hunt down some more of Eschbach's work.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai's BARON WENCKHEIM'S HOMECOMING (Tr Ottilie Muzet)

One of the funniest, saddest and most stupid character deaths since the middle interlude in Stephen King's The Stand, and -- for a different character! -- an equally ridiculous funeral scenes in a caliber with a Juzo Itami film are only two of the absolute delights on offer to a certain kind of reader in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming. 

I, needless to say, am that kind of reader. 

But first, Krasznahorkai makes his reader earn those delights, for this novel also contains some of the longest and most complicated compounds sentences that do not contain "the fact that" that I've yet seen. I read the ebook edition, so I couldn't actually count physical pages, but let's just say that the novel's very first sentence fills a number of them that's well into the double digits. Ottilie Muzet earned some delight, too, rendering such constructions into readable English prose.

Everybody has to work when Laszlo has something to say. But we already knew that. 

Nobody has to work as hard, though, as Krasznahorkai's characters, though maybe it's not a question of "work" so much as "endurance;" the title character, whom we quickly come to understand is not only elderly and aristocratic in that genteely poverty-stricken post-WWII way, but is also intensely neurodivergent. So of course, Krasznahorkai had to go and design the best (by which I mean worst) possible way to torment the old Baron that any literary sadist could devise. And he makes us share that torment, too, by making us understand precisely what the Baron's issues and tics are, making sure we always have them very much in mind, foreshadowing the torture in store for our poor protagonist, and then slowly unfolding his exquisite Rube Goldberg plot against the Baron's sensitivities over fully half the novel. 

The effect is not unlike watching the tied-up maiden squirm on the railroad tracks, intercut with scenes of the incoming train coming, starting from hundreds of miles away. -- but instead of a train it's more like a Katamari.

But I'm focusing too much on the title character, and there are so many other unfortunates whose fates are affected by decisions made by - and even more by decisions made about - this old aristocrat who is returning to the hometown he hasn't seen since his family high-tailed it out of Hungary sometime during or after the War. Chief among these is a famous professor whose own bad and weird chickens come home to roost and leave him hiding,as the novel begins, in a shack he built himself out of trash in an unsightly and overgrown vacant lot on the outskirts of the Baron's hometown* not long before The Homecoming. His cantakerousness, runaway philosophizing, inscrutable motives and surprising proficiency with firearms quickly bring him into conflict with a local Biker Gang as well as with local authorities, which, get ready for those. Each authority figure gets time in the spotlight, mostly to display the qualities that lead an anonymous commentator to pen a screed for publication in a local paper, the better to call out every excreble facet of the supposed Hungarian national character and leave them all pondering their commitment to Free Speech something something Epstein Files something something. 

Krasznahorkai even takes the time to poke a little fun at his very own writing style late in the novel, as the editorial staff of the local opposition newspaper contemplates the above-mentioned screed:

"- the gratuitous use of all these innumerable "wherases" and "wherebys," - I think we should just wipe these or like fleas in a pigsty"**

And we cannot forget the poor old lady who gets dragged unwilling into the spotlight when the gossip traveling ahead of the Baron's train reveals her as the Baron's long-lost first love, the whole reason he's made the journey from the land of his exile (and later disgrace), exotic Argentina, to this provincial Hungarian city. Marika, aka Marietta, barely remembers the Baron as an abnormally tall and thin youth who crushed on her from afar and once accidentally scared her into thinking he'd committed suicide. She doesn't even seem to have thought of him much when her relationships with a series of handsome but abusive jocks has left her alone and sad with a dead-end job and only one true friend in her old age. But now, suddenly, the whole city wants to know everything about her and has planned a whole romantic new chapter for her life as Mrs. Wenckheim, munificently helping the Baron to lavish his imagined millions on worthy civic projects and business ventures and deserving individuals, ever after. And if a few of them have already decided to start lobbying her for future gain, what's the harm?

But so, if The Melancholy of Resistance was a tr agedy, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is somewhere between a black comedy and a farce, but with real feeling for the people and places in which it is acting out. I was already a Krasznahorkai devotee, but now more than ever. 

 *Which, Easter eggs in the text suggest, is the same town depicted in The Melancholy of Resistance, and, for extra fun, it's impossible, if one has also read Chasing Homer as I so recently did, not to wonder as Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming unfolds, if maybe the Professor isn't going to end up being the fugitive in that novella!

**It is so hard to pull quotes from prose like this. One either gets a very short and pithy little clause pulled out of a sentence or a giant block of text full of ellipses lest one overwhelm the screen with a sentence longer than other books' entire chapters!

Vladimir Sorokin's BLUE LARD (Tr by Max Lawton

About midway through Vladimir Sorokin's infamous, absurd and obscene Blue Lard, a very au courant couple in an alternate (very alternate) mid 20th century Moscow go out on a very chic date that winds up forming a tableau of the most perfect encapsulation of the state of world culture in the 1990s I've encountered in a long time, maybe ever. It might seem ordinary at first: they attend a performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Ballet. But this ain't the stately, ornate palace of the arts you're no-doubt imagining right now. I mean, well, it is, but it's also so much more:

The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of the Moscow sewage system.  Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with strong enough lighting -- from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.

To attend a performance at this Bolshoi requires donning a kind of diving suit, and the lobby of the famous theater now functions as an airlock, from which the contents of the auditorium are pumped in and out to facilitate entry to the performances. The rest is pretty much a typical theater-going experience, just murkier. Oh, and you have to attach a special apparatus to your diving helmet to make it compatible with the drinks service in order to enjoy your champagne uncontaminated by #1 and #2 and whatnot. As is ever the concern when ordering comestibles in public, no?

By the way, sorry if any of the above grossed you out too much. But if it did, you might as well stop reading this post, and cross Blue Lard off your TBR, because the vast variety of offensive material packed into this novel, of which the Bolshoi sewer lagoon is by no means the most offensive, means it probably isn't for you. 

Except, well, you'd be missing out on a lot. Even a pretty decent and straightforward plot (well, except for some wibbly wobbly timey wimey bits) mixed in with outrageous scenes, nearly impenetrable slangs (including a lot in a sort of Russian/Chinese pidgin that only dorks like translator Max Lawton and Your Humble Blogger* likely really enjoy; there's a glossary in the back of the NYRB edition**) and off-kilter parodies of the works of most of Russian literature's greatest heroes that, to a 21st century reader, are gonna feel like the output of a Large Language Model force fed on Pushkin and Akhmatova, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Platonov and Chekhov, but are somehow both worse and better than that for reasons I'll get into later. 

Later in the book, after a hilariously explicit yet oddly tender sex scene that you've probably already heard about if you've heard anything about this book, the lovers have a bit of a literary discussion for their exhausted and happy pillow talk:

"I've forgotten what a book even is."

"That's forgivable for the leader."

"Are there interesting writers?"

"There are.  But not interesting books."

"In what sense?"

"You see... something is happening with Russian literature. But I still haven't quite understood what."

"Is it rotting?"

"Probably."

"Well, we're all rotting. As soon as a man stops growing, he starts rotting."

"A book isn't a man."

"Do you mean to say that books don't rot?"

Blue Lard is the first book that I've encountered that i truly feel could only have been written in the 1990s, a decade in which public intellectuals were making nonsense declarations about "The end of history" and predicting stagnation and stasis as all we had to look forward to now that the great Cold War had been "won" by the West. At the time I thought this attitude only prevailed in the West -- the former Soviet Union was still living through some mighty interesting times*** -- but here in this book that first saw print in 1999 we have the above arresting image of the flower of Russian arts and culture reduced to its very dregs, passed through a million digestive systems and still being circulated and presented as all there was on offer. And that's just for a start.

Egads, I love this weirdo, Sorokin.

But so,  what does all this have to do with lard, of any color? 

I'm not going to go too deep into the color stuff. Sean over at SFUltra handled all that just fine and I'd just be rehashing him. Suffice it to say that this particular term for the color blue in Russia has come to take on connotations not unlike our old use of "lavender." But what's the Lard?

Buckle up. 

So, for about the first third or so of the book, told by the way, in epistolary form by a technician to his absent lover in the kind of prose that might remind the reader of James Joyce's love letters to his wife, Nora, if James Joyce had been a Russian science fiction writer, concerns a bizarre project. For the good of Mother Russia, hilariously mis-grown  clones of great Russian literary figures of the past are set to work producing new texts, not for the sake of generating those texts (which are shared in full in these letters), but in order to collect the weird and unspecifically powerful residue that these clones produce as a byproduct of their literary efforts, a blue substance very like bacon fat that the clones secrete when writing.

So basically, Blue Lard is misbegotten creativity (the only kind Sorokin foresaw his culture producing as the millennium ended****) made tangible and collected to use as fuel for grander projects. Our correspondent and his coworkers all believe that it will serve as fuel to power a nuclear reactor on the Moon. Russian greatness of the future must consume Russian greatness from the past in order to achieve Russian greatness in the present. Or something. How all of that is supposed to work is beside the point -- very much so, as at no point do we even come close to seeing this reactor, or the Moon at all. What does become of the Blue Lard is so much weirder than that. So much. As Lawton says in his "extraduction" at the end of the book, Blue Lard isn't meant to be understood so much as borne witness to.

Except, and I know this is the very height of hubris to even pretend to say, I feel like I did, in fact, understand that to which I bore witness, here. Just not on a conscious level. Or a rational one. But Vladimir Sorokin and Max Lawton put something in my brain by means of black excrescences on white paper, and that something will live in there forever, inflating the view my inner eye has of my brain, like Tetsuo's body in the last act of Akira, eternally. If you've already read this book, you know exactly what I'm referring to here. Heh.

But so anyway, this whatever that Sorokin and Lawton put into my brain, can I even explain it? In a blog post? You see here that I have tried. But I feel like I've failed, even as most people feel like they have failed to understand Blue Lard. But maybe it's not a matter of understanding, or of bearing witness, but of making the mighty effort to invent a new art form, a new kind of expression, with which we can convey our individual and idiosyncratic experiences of reading Blue Lard. I'm game. How about you?

Rips, ni ma de.

*Recall that Mandarin and Russian are the two languages that I've made the most effort to sort-of learn except my squirrel brain is even worse about hopping from language to language than it is from book to book.

**But you don't really need it. Context clues are usually enough to get the gyst, and I think constantly flipping to the glossary page would just slow you down/annoy you into DNFing long before the real fun of Blue Lard even begins.

***My perspective on this is still, I freely admit, colored by my old Beaudacious Bard College classmate's big ugly book about his experiences in Russia in the 90s.

****I think he's been proven wrong on this score, I'm happy to say. Not only has Sorokin himself continued to publish some fascinating work almost as fucked up as Blue Lard, but so have the Dyachenkos, Tatyana Tolstaya, Eugene Vodolazkin, Victor Pelevin, Dmitry Glukhovsky and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, to name a few whose work I myself have read. Perhaps not all of this will be regarded as immortal work for the ages, but some of it likely will, and none of it is rotted or boring or terribly conventional. I've certainly enjoyed it quite a lot, anyway, some of it, like Vodolazkin's Laurus, I've read more than once and even decided to try reading in the original because I've liked it so much. To say nothing of Belorussian, Ukrainian and other Former Soviet states whose native writers are getting the kind of international attention that used only to be possible for either very orthodox or wildly transgressive Russian nationals 

Zülfü Livaneli's ON THE BACK OF THE TIGER (Tr Brenden Freely)

One hundred years and change ago, the Young Turks deposed the ante-penultimate Ottoman emperor, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and sent him, his wives and most of his children into exile in the then-Ottoman-controlled Greek City of Salonica/Thessaloniki. He was one of those rulers who was never meant to hold power, but when the throne came to him anyway, he gave up his idea of being a merchant and climbed up onto the the metaphorical beast named in Zülfü Livaneli's On the Back of the Tiger, a historical novel concerning Hamid's final years, and spent the next 30+ years of his life doing his best to look like he was riding that tiger rather than just being carried away by it. 

The novel, rendered into transparently readable, even journalistic English prose by Brenden Freely, is chiefly derived from the notebooks of one Atif Hüseyin Bey, who served as physician to Hamid and those members of his family who shared his exile. The doctor is thus a major character in the novel alongside the deposed sultan, and one of the book's greatest pleasures is watching the former's attitudes about the latter shift from resentment and hostility (Atif grew up with the prevailing idea of Hamid as the standard wicked and bloodthirsty tyrant) to grudging respect, to sympathy and even a kind of fondness, despite the constant criticism of his contemporaries, a number which includes the future first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

He was now certain that he and the former Sultan had reached a new agreement. It was as if he was the judge and the sultan was the defendant. One was interrogating, and the other was being interrogated. The doctor laughed aloud at the sense of power he felt, then began coughing from the cigarette smoke he just inhaled. After he got his coughing under control, he thought to himself,  Having power is a wonderful thing.

The uses and limits of a monarch's power when he sits atop a deeply entrenched bureaucracy is the main question On the Back of the Tiger sets out to explore. Abdulhamid II is regarded by history as the last absolute monarch the Ottomans allowed, but even he assumed the throne only by agreeing to become a constitutional one. That he dissolved the parliament within a year of his enthronement is the first charge laid against him by his doctor as stand-in for his people - but Hamid easily deflects this by pointing out that said parliament was one in which Turks were a decided minority; the parliament was composed of members of pretty much every ethnicity and religion the world had to offer, and most of these granfalloons were seeking independence from the Empire and thus had every incentive to undermine it and obstruct the executive (the Sultan). And Hamid became Sultan during another round of the Ottomans' historic conflict with Russia. Therefore the parliament forced Hamid's hand.

Hamid's sobriquet in the West, and amongst his own peoples in secret, was the Red Sultan, for all the metaphorical blood on his hands, chiefly for the Armenian genocide that happened on his watch. But how much responsibility can really be loaded into one man, even one popularly understood to be omnipotent? Was he really omnipotent, astride the tiger of state that fought him constantly and sought always to attack and devour him? 

His doctor keeps having to ask these questions as they get to know one another, as the doctor struggles to reconcile the historical villain with the mild, civilized and cultured man who takes more pride in his carpentry skills than in his lineage, and whose family members show real devotion to and affection for him at every turn, further undermining his monstrous reputation.

These conflicting ideas come to a head in, for example, an early conversation the doctor has with the former Sultan about the fate of an ex-official imprisoned on his orders, and presumably executed in jail on those orders, too. The Sultan insists that had he wanted that man dead, he would have just ordered him executed. The man's actual death by strangulation while imprisoned, Hamid says he didn't know of until it was too late for him to prevent it. How much power can one man wield over the vast and complex apparatus of an empire, comprising individuals constantly having to interpret their mandates and act on their initiative to do what they assume is his will? As they've been doing for hundreds of years according to tradition and perceived necessity?

Livanelli doesn't pretend to have the answers to any of these questions, but in inviting us to ponder them he invites us to think about our own current crop of wannabe Sultans, including the ones in Turkey and Hungary and Trumpistan. And while I certainly don't like being asked to extend sympathy or respect to these autocrats, the thing that really separates them from people like Hamid stands out in very sharp relief that finally makes me, at least, decide that I don't have to. Hamid never made the kinds of speeches that these guys do. At least not in public. At least not overtly. At least not in front of TV cameras.

But what did he say in private? Those things, we're never going to know.

But it sure is interesting to think about, isn't it?

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 

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.