Leonora Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.

Did you dig One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but kind of wish you could read it gender-flipped? Did you adore the television series Waiting for God but wish you could actually observe all of Tom Ballard's tall tales but as directed by someone like Lindsay Anderson? Leonora Carrington, my new other favorite sculptor-turned novelist, whom I might end up loving even more than sculptor-turned-novelist B. Catling, has you covered and then some.

I do not invoke Ken Kesey's masterpiece, nor my very favorite Britcom* at all lightly, as we'll see.

The text at the beginning of this post is an early declaration from our heroine, Mrs. Marian Leatherby, who has lived some 15 years with her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, two cats and a red hen and spent her days swapping tall tales with her best friend, Carmella, and sucking violet-flavored lozenges on Carmella's porch -- until one day, the very day Carmella gives her the titular hearing trumpet as a gift, Marian learns via the eavesdropping superpowers it gives her that her family considers her not only a burden but as a disgusting one** and is plotting to send her to live in an institution.

In her beastly family's defense, Marian is given to flights of fancy, very vivid and detailed ones in which she hallucinates entire chapters of her old life that blend almost seamlessly, from her point of view, into present conflicts. She freely admits this herself, telling us early on that "Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up." This establishes right away that we're in unreliable narrator territory for what's to come. And oh, what's to come.

The Lightshome (at least that's what I think they called it; ahh, audiobooks!) Home for Senile Old Ladies is a very unusual institution, to say the least. Run by a husband and wife team very much in the Big Nurse role (though not as effective), and rejoicing in the surname of Gambit. Dr. Gambit. Mrs. Gambit. Bahahahaha!), the place has just eight residents when Marian comes to be the ninth. With two exceptions, each resident lives in her own "bungalow" but these quarters are not just cute little houses. No, they are cute little houses in very fanciful forms: a boot, meaning there is at least one Little Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe, a birthday cake, a cuckoo clock, and Marian herself comes to live in what sounds at first like a lighthouse but might actually be a watchtower, the first floor of which is a masterpiece of trompe-l'œil, appearing to be chock full of useful furniture including a bookcase full of books, but only actually offering a single plain chair. This feels like foreshadowing about something or other that will happen later, but I guess it's just there for the sake of being weird, but that's okay, Leonora Carrington, last of the original Surrealists, can be just as weird as she wants, especially when...

Especially when her story is being narrated by the great Dame Jane Elizabeth Ailwên Phillips, aka Siân Phillips, aka Livia from I, Claudius and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim in David Lynch's Dune, that Siân Phillips and of course I had no business being surprised she could be this flat-out funny but oh my goodness, is she flat-out funny, even if the best wit has a menacing undertone that might not have been what Carrington intended but then again, Siân Phillips saw something in there that made her think of menace and I sure as hell ain't gonna argue with a lady packing a gom jabbar, are you?

Anyway. Marian is quickly embroiled in all kinds of weird little intrigues as she gets to know her fellow residents and the weird regime under which they live. Lightshome is not an expensive place in which to warehouse your unwanted elderly, and part of why is that the residents must help out with the kitchen and gardening work to keep the place going, and must also subject themselves to a weird experiment in spiritual discipline in the form of what Dr. Gambit and his wife (whose permanent strenuous yet unfriendly smile has earned her the nickname of Rachel Rictus behind her back) refer to as The Work. We don't see a lot of this, except at meals, when the ladies are required to listen to one of Dr. Gambit's bizarre lectures about the need for self-regulation and continued effort towards one's moral betterment. For instance, Marian, Dr. Gambit quickly notes, eats way too much cauliflower and this gluttony -- for a vegetable most people have to make an effort to acquire a taste for -- is a great impediment to her spiritual development, as is her tendency not to take "The Movements"*** seriously.

Quickly, Marian finds an escape from Dr. Gambit's hectoring in the form of contemplating a strange image on the wall in the dining room, of a nun who is either blind in one eye or winking at the viewer. As the story unfolds, Marian creates a whole backstory for "The Winking Abbess" only to find that it's true, down to the sonorous and elaborate Spanish name Marian dreamed up for this person. We get a full minisode in the novel's middle that is devoted to this story, which involves witchcraft, impersonation, cross dressing, attempted robbery, Templars and the Holy Grail, all delightfully and breathlessly told via a chronicle a resident smuggles to Marian, which purports to quote directly from period sources of unimpeachable accuracy and is clearly the part that Phillips best enjoyed narrating to us because WOW.

And things get even weirder. Apocalyptically so. Murders occur. Hunger strikes, too. And suddenly there's a new Ice Age?

And I haven't even gotten around to Marian's friend Carmella, who keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes to break Marian out of Lightshome, which she and Marian convinced themselves would be indistinguishable from a penitentiary complete with vicious police dogs, barred windows and hard labor. First Carmella is going to land a helicopter (which she will win in a lottery) and whisk Marian away to safety; later in letters she appears to have decided that it is best to dig a tunnel from her home to the institution's grounds and sneak Marian out that way -- and apparently actually starts digging it, because how else explain how she [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and can suddenly afford to [REDACTED] and hire a [REDACTED] to [REDACTED]?

Nor can I even begin to describe Marian's fellow residents, each of whom has her own set of quirks and pecadillos and petty grievances and delusions, all of which prove to be at least somewhat germaine to the novel's denouement which involves the Holy Grail again, with these residents being chosen not only to survive an environmental apocalypse that was predicted in a series of riddles they had to solve before getting to meet a secret extra resident but also to restore the Holy Grail to the original Mother Goddess whose earthly avatar is none other than The Winking Abbess.

All this in not quite seven hours of listening (or about 200 pages), which felt far too short; as I mentioned a few times on Twitter, this is a book I very much wanted to savor slowly but compulsively could not stop listening to and it's going to be hard to top for my favorite read of this silly second year of 2020 And Some Months and yes, I know it's only January, but really, I'm not sure that this isn't my favorite read of this stupid decade, maybe even this excreble century. Yeah. It's that great.

*Yes, I love it even more than Blackadder. Because Graham Crowden. And also Stephanie Cole.

**Not that we're shown any evidence that she is in any way disgusting, apart from sporting a bit of a little grey beard because she's stopped plucking her Old Lady Whiskers; still sound of body, of clean and regular habits, not given to outbursts or intrusions. She is given to elaborate flights of fancy involving vivid and improbable memories of her past, but her primary sin appears to be that she is old, doesn't like the television her grandson has introduced to the home, and doesn't like her daughter-in-law very much.

***These, as described, made me wonder hard whether Brit Marling or another of her co-creators of The OA is a fan of this novel. Which means yes, I kept waiting for the Movements to turn out to be intended to open some kind of portal and, honestly, given the strange way this novel ends, they could have had that effect? Or maybe something else did it? Who knows?

Shokoofeh Azar's THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE GREENGAGE TREE (tr. by Anonymous)

 

There's a scene towards the middle of Shokoofeh Azar's surreal Iranian tragedy, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, in which the family that is the novel's focus sets to work filling 400-page notebooks with their best recollections of the contents of the hundreds and hundreds of books that just got destroyed in a Revolutionary attack on their household. Quickly, before they forget, the parents and their three children are to write down summaries, memorable quotations, impressions, of every book the family owned: novels in many languages, poetry, journals, treatises on science and math, histories, scripture. It doesn't matter if they don't remember much, doesn't matter if something is incomplete or inaccurate, doesn't even matter if the text from, say, Romeo and Juliet suddenly turns into a passage from Will Durant about the city-state of Verona without warning. What matters is that everybody keeps writing, fills the pages. Better to have incoherent fragments of their lost treasures than nothing of them at all. For all they know, these fragments they're generating might be all that will ever survive of these works they've treasured; they've been living in happy isolation from the bad old outside world.

I think this scene is key to experiencing The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, because it promotes the understanding that what one is reading is actually one of these 400-page notebooks, in which the writer has attempted to provide a deeply felt family history but has also allowed memory, fantasy, and a deep love of Iranian folk culture and history to lead her down the garden path rather a lot. Thus an account of an actual (usually unbearably tragic) event in the family's life can drift into a magical realist fantasia of jinn and fireflies and a pilgrimage of ghosts who collectively shed enough tears to cause a flash flood in Tehran. 

All in almost unbearably gorgeous prose, so beautiful I want to hug this translator but I can't because their identity is a secret lest reprisals come their way, because Iran.

Of course, another possibility as to the "actual" authorship of the text we're reading suggests itself quite late in the book. To that point, we've understood ourselves to have been reading some kind of testimony by Bahar, one of the family's two daughters, who was burned to death at age 13 in 1979 when the Islamic revolution really took hold of Iran and of this family in the form of a fanatical attack on their household and especially the father's workshop where he handcrafted traditional musical instruments called tars. Bahar was in there helping him and learning the art when a group of angry fundamentalists broke in and burned the whole place down, with Bahar still in it. The father, Hushang survives, bitter but not broken, in part because Bahar's ghost remains with the family even as Hushang, wife Roza, and surviving children Sohrab and Beeta move from the palatial Tehran mansion their extended family has owned for over 200 years out to a remote village that isn't even served by a proper road.

The Revolution isn't done with them, though. Oh no. While the family enjoys long periods of relative prosperity, if not contentment, in the new home they establish on a hilltop above a podunk village (establishing in the process an incredible garden Azar and her translator describe so vividly that it kind of kills me that I can't ever actually visit it), even here they are not safe from extremism, the more or less organized forces of which inflict tragedy after tragedy on the family and on the village that has taken them in, until at one point, decades after the fire that destroyed his workshop and killed Bahar, Hushang, believing himself a sole survivor now, returns to Tehran and gets swept up by a new gang of fantatics making examples of people who dare to have in their possession forbidden things like CDs of popular Iranian music, and never mind that it's not illegal yet, buster.

They set him to writing a confession of all of his sins and his first draft, we are given to understand, reads a whole lot like what we've been reading, ghosts and jinn and mysterious pilgrimages and magical Zoroastrian treasure and women giving birth to goldfish and all. Has it been Bahar or Hushang telling us this story, really? But then, does it matter?

In the process what we get most of all is a meditation on memory, loss, and how forgetfulness* can be a temptation as much as a tragedy. The entire village, at one point, discovers that their sole literate citizen (before the coming of our hyper-literate protagonist family) isn't actually so literate. Nor were his predecessors, meaning that the written records of their family histories they've trusted him to interpret for them are pure fantasy. What follows is an excited outburst of liberation; everybody feels free to be brand new people and start right over, hooray! But then the government's literacy corps finally makes it to their little town and their tabulas are no longer rasa -- but potentially, because they're going to be rewritten by the Regime, rather than truly understood by their inheritors.

Author Shokoofeh Azar knows whereof she writes here, I imagine, having taken political asylum in Australia in 2011. This is her first work to be translated into English, but I really hope it's not her last. Her criticism of a regime that to this day still makes things incredibly difficult for artists of every kind (see also the Iranian film industry, hideously hampered by censorship but still managing to create works of intimate and deeply felt beauty) is hard to miss for all that it's drenched in folklore and fantasy, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's about as well regarded in her homeland as Salman Rushdie is, so Australia, please keep her safe!  And I hope her translator stays safe, too, wherever and whoever they are.

So in sum, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is one of the saddest books I've read since, well, since the last Persian book I read in translation, The Book of Collateral Damage! This is, of course, far too small a sample size to make generalizations from but nonetheless, whenever I hear a recommendation for a book that's been translated from the original Farsi, I'm going to put up my emotional dukes, just in case.

*Which, after a fashion, is the real nature of the "enlightenment" of the title, first experienced after a compulsive climb to the top of the titular greengage tree by the family's mother, Roza, described by Bahar-or-Hushang later on when, down from the tree and pondering her experience "she came to the same conclusion she had reached that day at precisely 2:35 P.M.: it’s not worth it, life isn’t what she had thought. Life is precisely that which she and others were prodigiously killing—the moment itself."

100 Books 120 - Octavia E. Butler's WILD SEED

It's been too long since I immersed myself in one of Octavia E. Butler's magical-biological-genealogical-alien-witchcraft-historical-futuristic-mind-blowing series. I always forget, until I'm deep into one, how much I love them, love her way with language, with imagery, with storytelling, with poetry, with imagination.

Wild Seed begins a series I've long had my eye on but had long avoided because my local public library didn't have all of it: the Patternmaster series, a late entry in which (Survivor) I accidentally picked up there many years ago. I have since learned that it is not specifically sequential, and that I could have enjoyed the books in any order, but now that I have them all in one convenient e-book file, my serial compulsion can be satisfied and I can submerge myself without anxiety.

Which is to say that I'm going to be picking up where I left off and starting the "next" Patternmaster book, Mind of My Mind, immediately after finishing this blog post.

Wild Seed concerns a sort of battle of body and mind between two all but supernatural beings in the colonial era, when black slaves were Africa's greatest export and white settlements in the New World depended on them utterly, north and south of a certain arbitrary boundary that would be drawn in a hundred years or so. Living and ruling several settlements in America (and elsewhere) is one Doro, thousands of years old, a being who takes over the bodies of others (sadly killing the original occupants in the process) and who has been breeding pockets humanity in semi-captivity to produce individuals with unique abilities like telepathy and telekinesis -- with the attendant responsibility to protect them from the rest of humanity who would regard his human livestock as witches and torture and burn them as such. And in Africa, living quietly but treated with reverence as an oracle is Anyanwu, an immortal shape-changer, a woman with such minute control over her body that she can analyze and overcome any pathogen or poison, can alter her very DNA to become any creature she has "analyzed" (by eating), and who has thereby lived for a good 300 years. Anyanwu turns out to be a "wild seed" -- the descendant of some lost or escaped members of one of Doro's earlier captive populations, whose talents are beyond Doro's wildest dreams. He Must Have Her and breed her with his other stock, whether she is willing or not.

If you're guessing that Butler has found in this science fictional/magic realistic story a way to comment on gender, slavery, race, free will, coercion and class, you're guessing right, but if you're guessing that she ever beats the reader over the head with these heavy notions, you're not. As Doro and Anyanwu struggle for control, these ideas and problems naturally occur, but only subtly. Butler is too deft a hand to preach at the reader. While she is often regarded as Zora Neale Hurston in genre fictional disguise (and Butler does have some of that lyrical quality for which Hurston is praised), Butler never feels like she is writing polemics or parables, even when some of her novels have "parable" in the title.

That being said, there is often a slightly creepy quality to Butler's work. I trace it to its explicit physicality, its minute focus on biology and how biology can be manipulated. Thus the Oankali of Lilith's Brood/Xenogenesis trilogy fame are some of the most fascinating and frightening aliens I've ever encountered, and here in this book we find that Anyanwu herself is one of the most compelling heroines, very nearly omnipotent, but cowed by Doro's threat to round up and all but enslave* her descendants (two of whom were caught in the same net she herself was, and whom Doro promptly bred to one another over her objections that this was incest; Doro forces his populations to breed incestuously all the time and just kills off any babies born with too many undesirable traits). Her power just makes her subjugation all the more desirable, and Doro is just the being to try to keep her in check -- and to keep her from realizing that she alone in all the world could actually oppose him if she dared.

Despite it all, though, this pair has a kind of love, and Octavia E. Butler is one of the very best novelists in the world when it comes to writing about love -- agape, filia or eros, it doesn't matter which. Reading one of her novels is like gorging oneself at a feast, but without the bellyache afterwards. She leaves me wanting more.

Good thing there still is some. But I probably should hoard those works of hers I haven't read yet and ration them out like EssJay and I do with Philip K. Dick. That's what I should do.

But, you know, I'm weak, and silly, and don't always do what I should.

*Doro's people do not live like slaves, happily dwelling in rich and prosperous towns and villages here and there, thriving and free to exercise their weird talents within those carefully controlled and defended enclaves, but their apparent freedom is that of pampered zoo animals, who don't even really get to choose their mates.

100 Books 50 - Haruki Murakami's KAFKA ON THE SHORE

When I was in school, magic realism seemed to be the special property of the South Americans -- Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato, Gabriel Garcia Marquez above all. And, Borges aside, I found it none too enchanting as an idea or a genre; it stayed on my radar but the pings were few and far between.

Then I stumbled across Haruki Murakami's After Dark while perusing the new books at my local public library a couple of years ago, and got hooked on Murukami's dreamy style, the clear concision of his prose, Murakami's erudition and his strange imagination. I rushed to read the rest of the library's collection of his offerings -- Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- and pegged him as someone to watch for, forevermore.

Reading Kafka on the Shore felt a lot like reading W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn (quite possibly my favorite read of this waning year) except with narrative. The same seductive dreaminess is there, the same plunges into what just cannot be but is so convincingly presented it feels true anyway, the same reluctance to finish and put the book aside. Unlike Rings of Saturn, though, which I ultimately did put aside to save it for a rainy day, Kafka on the Shore wouldn't let me go until its stories were told -- or mostly told*.

Murakami's characters inhabit strange inner and outer worlds that really don't often make sense, but are rendered in such lovely language (and Murakami does his own translating, I believe!) that the near-incoherence still just works. I can't imagine real people ever having the weirdly opaque conversations these characters do, or making the decisions they do, but I guess that's what makes this realism magic, no?

To talk about the details of the story -- a teenaged runaway, a murder, an Oedipal drama, a quest -- is not so much to commit the hideous modern sin of spoilers as to completely miss the point. This book is a lovely, gentle drug in prose form, mildly intoxicating and more than a little addictive. And yes, I want more.

*Frustratingly, there are narrative questions left unanswered, including one really big one that I'm still a little miffed about. The whole of the two interwoven accounts starts with a strange event of which there is no account; we see its effects but nothing of the cause. This absence still gnaws at me and spoils my enjoyment of the book just a bit.