Namwali Serpell's THE FURROWS: AN ELEGY

"There's a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some before and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn't creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It interrupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It says if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening."

Are we, for the rest of our lives, going to be able to distinguish COVID period literature from pre-COVID at a glance, or will the things that we think distinguish it just fade into the background noise of all writing from all times? I suppose we'll have to wait a while to find out but right now I feel like I can spot a pandemic book (or maybe it's a post-Trump thing?) immediately just from the way characters seem to experience time. It's there in Chuck Wendig's Wayward (a sequel to a book specifically about a pandemic that was published just months before what we in 2022 are still referring to as "the" pandemic) and it's perfectly encapsulated in the above passage from Namwali Serpell's novel-length exploration of the experience of grief, The Furrows: An Elegy.

As readers of this blog already know, I really, really loved this author's The Old Drift and consider it a pretty much perfect piece of speculative fiction, so I was getting pretty frantic as I kept checking to see if my public library had acquired her latest yet, only every time to be disappointed until I thought to check and see if they had it on dead tree, and sure enough, it's still right there on the New Arrivals shelf. Bugger me, I was going to have to use my hands and arms to hold it open and turn the pages to read it. It had better be worth it, I sighed as I grabbed it to take home.

Well, it sure was, though the physical pain of reading it is pretty well matched by the emotional damage it has to inflict, because this is the story of a young woman, Cassandra, who's little brother, Wayne, died on her watch when she was 12 and he was seven, and who's family fell apart soon after, the way that families often do on the death of a child. Cassandra's mother, unconvinced by the explanation little Cassandra gave her of what happened and also by the disappearance of Wayne's body, plunges into the forming of a foundation dedicated to finding Wayne and other missing little angels and neglects her even more than she already had (an artist, she had a tendency to disappear into her studio for entire summers, leaving her older child to mind the younger when they ventured out into the world); Cassandra's father soon deserts them altogether to start a new family with a new wife. And Cassandra gets foisted off on her unpleasant grandmother a lot until she is a grown woman adrift in the world and constantly, mysteriously, encountering beautiful young men (there is almost always an element of sexual attraction in these encounters) who she quickly comes to believe are her long lost baby brother, all grown up and ready to tell her all about what has kept them apart all of these years.

I lost someone very, very close to me my first year away from home, quite possibly the closest friend I'd ever had and someone I once thought I would marry, and for decades I had dreams in which he turned up still alive with a story to tell, and encountered people in real life who I could almost believe were him from time to time, so reading The Furrows was a lot like, not so much picking scabs after all this time but digging at scars. I was prepared for this, knowing that grief was the theme of this book, and that Serpell is a stunning writer, but I still had to put this down even more often than I usually do with hardcover books just to catch my breath from the emotional blows it had to deal.

It's also a surreal read, in that we get multiple versions of how and where Cassandra, who at 12 has internalized the idea that "Wayne was a creature for my watching, for my keep" loses her little brother, and that an uncanny "windbreaker man" appears near the end of each narrative. The windbreaker man's constant appearance in these variant narratives is a key reason why Cassandra's mother traps herself in a prison of unbelief when he proves to be as elusive as lost Wayne, every time. Every time, too, that Cassandra meets someone, often under another name, whom she concludes is actually her brother, the circumstances are weird and uncertain -- and if that isn't a perfect encapsulation of how grief and imperfect memory keep on swamping us throughout our lives, I don't know what is.

Adding layers of ambiguity is Cassandra's time with therapists, each of whom has a different understanding of her trouble and a different recommendation for how she deals with it, a series of them guiding her through the processes of remembering (which we now know is rewriting/re-imagining more than it is replaying a perfectly recorded scene) and then simplifying the narrative of her trauma, whittling it down to what the therapists consider its essentials. They all seem more interested in focusing on Cassandra's guilt than in questioning whether it was appropriate for her mother to load her with so much responsibility, for instance.

And that's all just the first half of The Furrows; midway through, we switch narrators and suddenly enter the perspective of the man/men she has been encountering, who has a whole different set of motivations and experiences and ideas about what has been going on between him and Cassandra and her missing brother, and you'll never in a thousand years guess what's actually going on with him. I'll just say this elevates The Furrows from just another lovely and sensitive meditation on loss and survivorship to a full on consideration of and confrontation with most of the other ways that life can hurt us until we cry and won't stop even then.

 

But even that's not enough for Serpell, who, recall, originally dazzled me with a pretty much perfect piece of speculative fiction/African futurism. So of course she's got more than this going on!

"So, this is what time looks like to us. A rope, a line pulled tight. But that’s just the past, the things that already happened, one after the other, in a line. But the future?” Mo drew a fan of lines at the top end of the rope, like it was unraveling. “Threads of possibility. Infinite threads.But you see, when time goes on, they get twisted together into the rope. The coulda-woulda-shouldas get twisted inside of what we did."

The second half of the novel utterly re-contextualizes the first, down to all of Cassandra's different versions of how she lost her little brother, teasing us to the very end with the idea that something supernatural, or at least timey-wimey, is in store for us, all by way of distracting us from the love story that is actually taking place just outside of our field of attention. But Cassandra told us, right at the novel's very beginning, "I don't want to tell you what happened, I want to tell you how it felt." How things feel doesn't always make sense, doesn't always obey linear time or fixed identity, is sometimes kaleidoscopic and sometimes slams us to a halt at an unexpected place. Serpell has captured this pefectly. She's joined the ranks of authors whose work I will snatch up without hesitation, just because it's hers.

Next time I'll be a little better prepared emotionally, though. Yeouch!

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?

Michael Cisco's THE DIVINITY STUDENT

I was sent to suffer and learn and to join the Eclogue. From dictaction: you split off and are the ghost sent to encounter my soul as a stranger, bring with you the offering of the first. lost image of us together. When you are caught dreaming, look in a mirror to wake yourself. I correspond to San Veneficio in this way -- its soul is brought to me by the saints who are my eyes and ears.

No, the above passage is not written in fungi on the wall of a "tunnel" in a weird wilderness, but rather the notebook of a mad scientist who kind of combines Herbert West and Dr. Hill, who... Let me start again, here.

It's been a while since I knowingly picked up a book that I knew would scramble my brains without using a whisk, and the year's almost over, so why not give The Divinity Student another try?

Like a lot of my friends, I first came across Michael Cisco and his super-surrealist stylings via a Humble Bundle yoinks ago (the same bundle that brought me Stephen Chapman's The Troika. When they said weird, they meant it). The Divinity Student was the first one out of there that I tried to read, but I didn't make it past our nameless hero* being killed by a lightning stike at the summit of a mountain hike** and reanimated by the faculty of his divinity school via the time honored tradition of *checks notes* removing all of his internal organs (well, except we learn later that he still has lungs. Ah, but then... did they leave him his original lungs, or make him new ones?) and stuffing him with paper that's covered in writing, any paper, any writing will do.  I want to draw a parallel to the legend of the Golem but I'm really not equipped to do it well, so I'll just gesture vaguely that-a-way and move on.

If there is any religious overtone to The Divinity Student besides the obviousness there in the title, it is Christian, though, rather than Jewish, as this resurrected super-being winds up gathering up twelve... not disciples... not assistants... twelve people whose participation, after a fashion, are necessary to his quest which, about that...

The Divinity Student is then dispatched to a city to take up a post as a "word finder" which could have been a sort of active and social job, wandering the streets and talking to people and picking up the latest neologisms and slang like a lexical Cayce Pollard, but instead he is set to work sifting through ancient tomes looking for ancient words that have been lost, forgotten, or had heretofore not been noticed at all by the dominant culture. As though he was interning for Gene Wolfe, am I right, friends?*** But that's only his cover mission, see? Or so he is told as soon as he starts to converse with his fellow word finders over meals and whatnot.

The plot, though, isn't what is important at all. It's the prose, and the dreamlike quality of it. Any two-bit surrealist can stick a bunch of incongruous images together and call it art, but it takes real care and attention and a very particular cast of mind to make us not only see a weird image, but to feel that we are part of it even as it flows and changes into a completely different weird image in the way that dreams actually do. And Cisco is a master at it, one that, perhaps, I had to read Jeff Noon's Nyquist series, in which the hero is subject to unending weird compulsions, entranced, retrieved, re-entranced, bossed around like Alice knocking around urban wonderlands and acquiescing to increasingly bizarre behavior that still kind of fits into a time honored structure, before I could really appreciate what Michael Cisco is up to, here. More even than the Nyquist books, The Divinity Student wants to draw you right into the experience of being a reanimated marionette of a man who may or may not be succeeding in ripping out his strings and tying someone up in them.

Us. He's tying us up in them.

Before too long, our man has a sidekick, possibly the best single element of this book: Teo Desden the butcher, whom the Divinity Student first consults on an errand and later sort of befriends. Teo actually has a personality and motives of his own and is really entertaining and charming in an off-putting but amusing way, as in exchanges like this one:

"This is going to involve more than one corpse, isn't it?" The Divinity Student pauses. "Yes, possibly as many as twelve..." Teo suddenly gets excited. "Listen, the bodies, what are you going to do with them when you're through?" 

 Of course I got all of the Sweeney Todd vibes, especially having earlier seen what Teo can really do in this crazy little scene-within-a-scene that also gives us a look at Cisco's prose at its most straightforwad, if still a little weird:

The Divinity Student watches a fly zing in through the open door. With a speed that defies vision Teo uncoils, sending a four-inch steel blade silent across the room flashing once under the fluorescents and the fly runs right into it. Two black halves drop to the tiles, the knife lands on its hand on the sideboard and slides an inch to rest, just tapping the base of the mirror.

Oh, did I mention that the main room of Teo's butcher shop has a giant mirror in one wall like you'd expect in a ballet studio, the better for Teo to admire and cultivate his balletic moves with meat and cutlery, I guess? Like I said, he's an actual character, is Theo. I'd read a book just about him, continuing my habit of always falling in love with sidekicks and background characters instead of heroes...

But while Teo is showing off his knife work, the Divinity Student, whom we've already seen takes the longest and most convoluted way around to the solution to any problem he encounters, is busy building a divining machine, and look out Rube Goldberg, it's a doozy. Where one would expect a divining machine to be intended to make predictions a bit easier to comprehend and absorb, the Divinity Student's machine is an elaborate and colorful and magical contraption that... bascially creates fancy Rorschach blots for him to stare at and try to interpret later. I mean, this thing makes my brain itch.

Oh, and he also gets a girlfriend of sorts, Miss Woodwind, the boss's daughter, who comes as close as we're going to get to an audience stand-in, or such is how she feels toward's novels end, when she finally gets fed up with the nonsense and yells at him "What are you doing now... Come on, answer me! I've been here all this time waiting for you, at least you could tell me what's happening!"

I feel you, girl. And I think I'm going to have to read this one again sometime before I can even remotely feel like I got an answer.

Does it sound like I'm not sure what I just read? Well, I'm not sure what I just read. But I liked it, and I'm going to read Cisco's follow-up to this, The Golem, pretty soon.

*Why are so many of the books I'm taking up lately about people whose real names -- or names at all -- are withheld from the reader?

**Of the kind I've taken many a time, and if you make it to the top of Medicine Bow Peak, you've been at risk of this same thing happening. I've never not encountered lightning up there. It's a phenomenal, and phenomenally beautiful, hike, though!

***Also, there's another belovedly Wolfean element central to this weird plot, in that our hero is obliquely taught a bizarre way to harvest the memories and experiences of the dead in a way that isn't as cannibalistic as the analeptic alzabo but is almost as gross.

J.G. Ballard's THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY

There are few genres of literature I loathe more than the mid-century White Male Narcissist novel, so given that, as much as it is anything, The Unlimited Dream Company is one of those, well,  it's a good thing I went into it cold out I never would have touched it. Especially not a used copy of it, because it would doubtless fluoresce under black light, if you know what I mean.*

That aside, this is still a J.G. Ballard novel, and hey, it's not as "bad" as, say, Henry Miller (whom I also admire even as he makes me roll my eyes a lot). Indeed, one might even point to this book as an example of what a Henry Miller sci-fi/ fantasy novel might have been like had Miller ever bothered to try these genres.

Interestingly, though, what drew me in, and drew me in so far that by the time I realized what I really had on my hands (ewwww), was this novel's resemblance to the work of one of my favorite film directors, Peter Greenway. Specifically, to one of his most eccentric and experimental feature films, The Falls.

This book, which starts off sounding so much like the "Tulse Luper" story "The Cassowary" that I all but screamed, could easily be taken as a description of the Violent Unknown Event which caused all of the effects catalogued in The Falls. The film, you see, is presented as a series of biographical sketches of VUE victims, with attention to their physical symptoms, their new languages, their dreams and new obsessions, all resulting from, it's generally understood, their sudden and unexplained, simultaneous and incomplete transformation into birds. A major feature of The Unlimited Dream Company is the frequent metamorphoses of the protagonist, a Mr. Blake (a nod to the poet / print artist William Blake, of course), and, at one time or another many or all of the population of a London suburb, into birds, as well as fish or various mammals.

So, I put up with all of the constant references to and descriptions of Blake running around naked and being all but worshiped for it, Blake causing luxuriant tropical plants to sprout everywhere that he sprays his considerable volume of semen (dude is a firehose), Blake entertaining taboo sexual fantasies about everything with a pulse, Blake daydreaming about one woman's body odor, etc. He never gets quite so self - aggrandizing as Miller (well, okay, he comes close on occasion, but never at Miller's, umm, length), nor as opaque as Greenway, at least.

By which I mean the prose is as clear and readable as ever, without ever getting too banal or clinical as one might expect a science fiction writer might do when getting explicit with a capital X. Hey, I'm surprised, too.  But I shouldn't be. I am a Ballard fangirl for life, and am now convinced that he'll never let me down.

I might just need to chill out with some nice Sigrid Undset or something for a while once I'm done with some of my current projects, one of which is a review of D. Harlan Wilson's critical biography/ bibliography of J.G. Ballard, which I'll be posting soon to Skiffy and Fanty. Hence my deep dive into Ballardiana I hadn't yet read!

*And if you don't, I envy you.