The Savage Detectives

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

A couple of times over the past year or so, I've heard the expression "like a Bolaño novel", and being a curious reader, and finding this highly-rated example on my library's list of audiobooks, I gave The Savage Detectives a listen, and in it, nothing happens, and if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

This novel is in three parts. In the first, we meet the (apparent) protagonist through his diary entries:

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.

Instead of following his uncle's plan, however, Juan Garcia meets an avante-garde group of poets who call themselves the Visceral Realists, he drops out of school, loses his virginity, writes poetry, and when an angry pimp shows up at a New Year's Eve party, Juan Garcia joins a group on a roadtrip to ferry Lupe the prostitute to safety.

The second part interrupts at this point, and taking up two-thirds of the novel, it's a series of over forty first-person accounts of people who have come into contact with two of the Visceral Realists -- Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (the alter-ego of author Roberto Bolaño) -- who were the other two men with Juan Garcia and Lupe in the getaway car. Spanning the years from 1976 to 1996 and stretching over four continents, these accounts were a real slog to listen to as they were shortish and had nothing in common other than the unflattering glimpses of Lima and Belano.

If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy, right?

And what do you get if you mix the surreal with the boring? Do you end up with surreal or boring? That may be the real question, right? In the third part, we rejoin the getaway car, and for the longest time (nearly an hour?) I listened to Juan Garcia quiz the others on their knowledge of obscure poetry terms as they decide to spend their time on the road trying to track down a reclusive Mexican poet, popular in the 1920s, named Cesárea Tinajero. 

If all of this is typical -- if this is what the phrase "like a Bolaño novel" is meant to convey -- at least I learned something, but it was an expensive lesson at 27 hours of bored listening. If this reads better on the page, I'm willing to accept that the mistake was mine, but I think I've learned an even bigger lesson: I just don't connect with Latin American fiction. I wasn't wowed by Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, or, more recently, by Vásquez's The Sound of Things Falling. These are all considered great literary works, so I can accept that the problem is with me, and even so the problem remains. No me gusta.

All the Light We Cannot See

What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

All the Light We Cannot See is a very popular book -- as lyrical and easy to read as a modern day fable -- and as much as I did mostly enjoy it in the moment, this book's overall effect was to leave me unsatisfied. In an interview with the author, Anthony Doerr says that his intention with this book is to have readers ask themselves What would I be doing in this situation? Was the war just good versus evil in the way some History Channel reenactments are skewed to portray World II? As someone who is always wary of moral relativism, I'm not interested in "understanding" what made Nazis tick, I don't think the History Channel needs to work very hard to show that there was a right side and a wrong side in WWII (an alliance with Stalin aside, stopping the Nazis was objectively moral), and any author who would trivialise the actual facts of history in order to use them as the backdrop for a light work of fiction risks normalising that which once horrified us.

The plot of this book switches between the points of view of three characters and hops from the "present" of August 1944 to further back in time in order to reveal the personal histories of these three. Marie-Laude is a blind Parisian girl whose father evacuated with her to his uncle's home in the walled island city of Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast. Werner is a German orphan boy who, after displaying an innate facility for electricity and mechanics, attends a prestigious military training school until called to serve in the army. Sergeant Major von Rumpel is a Nazi art and gem expert, collecting treasures for Hitler's Führermuseum, who spends his army career on the trail of a mysterious diamond -- the Sea of Flames -- said to carry both cure and curse. 

Curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn't it?

These three characters eventually make their way to Saint-Malo (revealed immediately -- not a spoiler) and are all present when the Americans firebomb the city. These sections set in the present are tense and exciting, but as we are eventually made to sympathise with each of their situations and motivations, the Americans' wilful destruction of a centuries old city is hinted to be the most unfathomable crime here. Not enough relativism? How about the only Russian soldiers shown are drunken-vandal-rapists? Still not enough? How about Marie-Laude, involved in a small way with the French Resistance, worriedly asking her uncle, "Are you sure we're not the bad guys?"

You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

Okay, the politics of this book didn't work for me, but what about the writing? Like in a fable, there were so many enchanting images -- the ten thousand keys of the Natural History Museum, puzzle boxes and miniaturised cities, a grotto by the sea, a cursed gem -- and Doerr works overtime to inflame the imagination. With a multitude of adjectives and vivid imagery, the effect comes down to a reader's taste. According to the Washington Post:

I’m not sure I will read a better novel this year…Enthrallingly told, beautifully written and so emotionally plangent that some passages bring tears, it is completely unsentimental — no mean trick when you consider that Doerr’s two protagonists are children who have been engulfed in the horror of World War II.

And The Guardian:

Doerr's prose style is high-pitched, operatic, relentless. Short sharp sentences, echoing the static of the radios, make the first hundred pages very tiresome to read, as does the American idiom…No noun sits upon the page without the decoration of at least one adjective, and sometimes, alas, with two or three. And these adjectives far too often are of the glimmering, glowing, pellucid variety.

And an example of the writing:

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing in corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth's crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

If you like that, you'll love this book. (And as an aside, in that same interview above, Doerr said that the extremely short chapters in this book are because: My prose can be dense. I love to pile on detail. I love to describe… It's like I'm saying to the reader, "I know this is going to be more lyrical than maybe 70 percent of American readers want to see, but here's a bunch of white space for you to recover from that lyricism.") This is the kind of book that I feel bad for not liking -- you have to be a monster not to empathise with the blind girl and the orphan boy who are pawns in the jaws of history -- but if an author deliberately tries to manipulate me with fictional characters like this, he better have something deep to say. I completely understand why All the Light We Cannot See is a popular best-seller -- it's a thriller involving sympathetic characters in one of the most psychically scarring times in human history -- but it was not for me.

God is only a white cold eye, a quarter moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

Edit from April 20:

So apparently, this book that I gave two stars to won the Pulitzer Prize for 2015, making it one more in a list of winners that underwhelmed me. According to the Prize's FAQ:

What are the criteria for the judging of The Pulitzer Prizes?

There are no set criteria for the judging of the Prizes. The definitions of each category (see How to Enter or Administration page) are the only guidelines. It is left up to the Nominating Juries and The Pulitzer Prize Board to determine exactly what makes a work "distinguished."

Obviously, the judges are looking for something different than I am, and they're the experts, and there ya go.

Mind Picking : Goodnight Desdemona

As with Kennedy's performance last year in The Man of Mode I've decided to just copy and paste the review from the U of G's school newspaper here to preserve it for myself (and hope I'm not contravening anybody's copyright) :

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

 Mar 26, 2015  Zoey Ross  Arts & Culture, Top Story  0

---

University of Guelph Mainstage presents play by Ann Marie MacDonald

Last week, the School of English and Theatre Studies staged an existential crisis that changed the way I watch Shakespeare.

Students from production and performance classes brought to life the play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)by Ann Marie MacDonald.

Although the title would imply that some knowledge of Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet would be necessary, that was not the case. Kennedy Thompson, who played the main character, Constance Ledbelly, and cast made the audience laugh until we had to squeeze our knees together.

The play snatches the protagonist, Constance, and places her in the world of Shakespeare. Before she was the protagonist, she was an assistant professor at Queens University. All the tri-colour in the world could not help her gain a better station in her career or within the heart of the professor she worked for. Very quickly, it’s made clear that this is not the world that the Bard of Avon created. For comparison, the play shows the same events multiple times, once through a traditional lens and then through the mind of Constance. With her interpretation comes the quirky and emotional projection of her own thoughts and feelings. Desdemona, who was brought to life by Gracie James, is suddenly more powerful and carries an air of dominance, while originally in Othello, these qualities are nonexistent.

Courtesy of MainStage.
Deftly directed and inspiringly acted, Anne Marie Macdonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) was brought to hilarious and subtext-heavy life by the University of Guelph’s Mainstage Productions.

This piece embraced the script, but directors Scott Duchesne and Sarah Bannister brought their own additions to the original.

“I think there is a tendency towards farce, we just amped it up,” said Duchesne, one of the co-directors. “My tendency is to… try and find every funny moment that you possibly can. If there is a moment that can be funnier that’s great [...].”

If you are a fan of Monty Python and farcical comedy, you could enjoy this play as a rowdy treat even without the humanist subtext. Akin to Shakespeare’s plays, you have the option to opt in to see the greater themes of feminism, sexuality, and duality, or take the laughs at face value and go with it. Unfortunately, this play, because of the added level of farce and antics, makes it less appealing to opt in. Themes are plenty and there is much to critically perceive, but trying to build an understanding of how the play is about personal liberation is difficult when you’re laughing through tears. Alexander Wight was just too funny. Wight should drop out, start his own Python-esque troupe, and call it a day.

Gordon Harper is the real one to worry about in this play. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is famed for having only five cast members and 16 characters. Harper, who plays Romeo, Iago, Chorus, and Ghost, succeeds with great zeal by splitting his entirety and augmenting each character. He is practically the horcruxed Lord Voldemort of stage play, all the while balancing buckets of disgusting. Each character stands alone with their own personality and creepy motivations.

None of the antics or office awkwardness would have been possible if it wasn’t for the brilliant set design, props, and costumes. Nearly explosive turtles, accurate timepieces, and a head that appears from a garbage can, were a few effects that brought the show together.

Past all of the comedic fare offered by this production is a story of equality and liberation. In this world, Juliet is a personification of Constance’s own sexual frustration and needs. Juliet was expertly played by Elizabeth Richardson, who delivered the dirtiest jokes from the youngest character. She brought out the true spirit of an almost-14-year-old. Brace yourself, parents, but your young teens talk about sex all the time even if they have no idea what they are talking about. It is this same pent up and juvenile longing that resides inside of Constance. The 37-year-old relativist succumbed to the pressure and was about to hop in bed with Juliet. If that’s wild in Constance’s mind then look out for the continuing Juliet suicide joke. Alas, this was all (suicide jokes excluded) a step towards Constance’s own personal, sexual liberation.

“We started the play with the idea that the entirety of the show is like The Wizard of Oz. Even though it might have happened in my head, still the journey was real to me,” said Thompson, about her portrayal of the character Constance. “All of the characters represented different elements of my subconscious”.

Thompson was able to take Constance and imbue her with qualities of her own person. This equated to a very real and honest representation of Constance. Even when it felt like the comedy was impeding the undertones of play, Thompson shone through with her down to earth character portrayal and quirkiness. Constance is a relatable character; sometimes, all we want to do is finger eat Velveeta and live out our days with our cats, but we must find our own liberation.

Dave and I saw the show three times, and during the intermission on opening night, Canadian comedy icon Ron James (about as famous as a Canadian can get without hitting the big time outside Canada) was buying some concession snacks and then went to introduce himself to the play's director as "Gracie's father" (Gracie is on the right above). After the play, the director, Scott, went to the green room and said, "Um, Gracie, your Dad is Ron James." 

She replied, "Yeah, he is."

"And you never told us," said Scott.

"Well," said Gracie, "there's never really a good opportunity to blurt out 'By the way, guys, my Dad's kind of famous...'"

As the Bard might say: Touché. 

And it also needs to be said that, although Gracie is a Psych major who took this course for fun, she has an amazing stage presence and a real gift for comedy. Dave declared she was "grounded" and had "chops". 

Ken took his whole family to see the show one night, so beforehand, Ella had asked me what the play was about. I explained that Kennedy is a professor who is writing a paper on Shakespeare and wants to prove that Romeo and Juliet and Othello were stolen from earlier works, and by removing a Fool character, Shakespeare turned comedies into tragedies. Because they are kids and seeing their first adult-themed play (OK, Ella did go to Man of Mode last year; my concerns were really about Conor), I decided to warn them that the play is funny but don't be surprised when there are girls kissing girls and boys chasing boys. 

Conor, 12, made a mock-horrified face, pointed at me and said, "G-g-g-g-gay...g-gay..."

I scowled at him (even though I knew he was teasing and trying to impress me with his street-savvy) and said, "Yeah. That's why I'm warning you. That would be inappropriate for you to do during the play."

And before Conor could protest, Ella, 10, piped up from behind us with, "And besides, Conor, when it's a girl and a girl it's called lesbian."

I don't know why I thought for a second that anything would go over their heads...

When Dave and I attended the final performance, we were sitting in the second row and before the play began, the director and his student assistant director, Sarah, sat in the row behind us. I would have thought that the backs of our heads were distinctive enough that anyone sitting behind us would recognise me and Dave as Kennedy's parents, but we overheard this conversation:

"I looked over here before the play started last night and I saw this guy with his arms crossed and he looked like nothing was going to amuse him. I think it was Kennedy's Uncle Dan," said Sarah.

"Right, Uncle Dan."

"So, I was looking at him and I thought 'That's my metric for success tonight. If I can make Uncle Dan laugh, then it's a good show'. And I'm watching and every now and then I'd look at Uncle Dan and he did laugh, but he never relaxed. He never uncrossed his arms."

"Uncle Dan has pressures that you can't imagine," said Scott.

"Yeah, Viet Nam."

"In 1968, in Khe Sanh, Uncle Dan saw things -- he did things -- that are going to haunt him for the rest of his life."

"Yeah," said Sarah, "he goes to the theater to try to forget."

"And sometimes he laughs."

"But he'll never forget."

And then Sarah broke the running joke by remembering some Family Guy episode, that I couldn't help but try to later identify (along with the proper spelling of Khe Sanh -- OK, I'm a nerd) as this one:

What's even stranger is that Dave and I had been at that performance the night before, sitting beside Uncle Dan (who laughed throughout the whole thing) and still Scott and Sarah didn't think to edit themselves around us (for which I'm glad because I found this whole story hilarious).

Too bad Kennedy will likely never have a role this big again at school -- there's a limit of 2 Main Stage performances with a possibility of a third only if she can make the case for a special project in a later year -- because, as I hope this post proves, it was kind of a big deal for her and for us. If it was up to me, I'd see Kennedy transfer to a proper theater school to concentrate on acting if that's her real passion, but in the end, I can't argue with Dave's advice for her to get her B.A. 

Because Arts Degrees are gold, Baby!

And for my last observation, it's also too bad that it's Kennedy's last big performance because my parents have never seen her in anything significant. My mother was supposed to drive up, but the day before she was going to leave, a major snowstorm came through her area, leaving her home like this:

Yeah ^^ that's over the roof of her Honda Pilot, and there were more storms coming, so it's no wonder she had to bow out. Ken thought that was weasly of her, and even though Ma has developed a fear of flying, he thought that if she promised not just my kids but his -- Conor hurt his hand karate chopping his bedframe when he was told Nan couldn't come -- she should have gotten over herself and got on a plane. I shrugged it off -- what are you gonna do?

But had she gotten on a plane as soon as enough of that snow was cleared for her to get to the airport, she might very well have been on this flight home last night:

So, what are you gonna do? I can't imagine we'll see Nan on a plane anytime soon, and in the words of Alanis Morrisette...isn't it ironic? 

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

As the torpedo advanced, the water rushing past its nose turned a small propeller, which unscrewed a safety device that prevented detonation during storage. This propeller slipped from the nose and fell to the sea bottom, thereby exposing a triggering mechanism that upon impact with a ship's hull would fire a small charge into the larger body of explosives. A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection. The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake".

Explaining the circumstances of Dead Wake to my daughter -- three years after the Titanic disaster, another "unsinkable" luxury ocean liner was sent to the briny depths with catastrophic loss of life; though this time not at the hands of a rogue iceberg but by its intentional torpedoing by a cold-blooded U-boat commander -- she marvelled at how she, a second year University student, had never even heard of the Lusitania, remarking that this second sinking has all the markings of the bigger story. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, this book is not only timely, but one could argue, is long overdue.

Author Erik Larson put an incredible amount of research into this book, and with information from the memoirs, journals, and letters of the Lusitania's passengers and crew, the writings in contemporaneous newspapers, memoirs of historical figures of the time, and even the logbook of the U-boat's commander, he is able to create a narrative that is rich in detail and story. With chapters that introduce all of the major players and then alternate between the happenings during the Lusitania's final crossing, chapters that outline the progress of WWI and other world events, and chapters from the point of view of the submarine, even though the reader knows the fate of the mighty ship, Larson is able to create and maintain tension in Dead Wake, and for the most part, it's a very enjoyable reading experience.

So, why is it only enjoyable "for the most part"? I am often impatient with authors (like Laura Hillenbrand, for example) who feel the need to cram every interesting fact they discover into a creative non-fiction book like this. Even though Larson has fifty pages of footnotes at the end (where he has put most of the details he couldn't squeeze into the book itself), he still indulges in sharing plenty of facts that serve no purpose to the story. For example, after his first wife died, President Wilson became interested in a woman, Edith Galt, who, we are informed, was the sister-in-law of a man who inherited the prominent jewellery store that was repairing Lincoln's watch when the Civil War broke out. The watch, the store, the brother-in-law, none of these matter. As a matter of fact, other than the detail that the Lusitania sailed from New York City and something like 10% of its passengers were Americans, this isn't really an American story at all and the long sections about Wilson's pursuit of Edith served zero purpose in the big picture. At the beginning, Larson stated that he thought he remembered being taught that the sinking of the Lusitania precipitated America's entry into WWI, but since they didn't enter for a further two years, I suppose the case can be made that examining Wilson's priorities at the time can clear up that misconception, but since the ship's sinking didn't affect Wilson's official stance of neutrality and the response of the U.S. didn't affect what was happening over there, everything set in Washington D.C. felt extraneous to me (yet I can't, in the end, fault an American writer for telling the story from his own perspective).

And then, there's the writing. Larson did do a good job of making this historical event read like an exciting adventure tale, but often his prose felt indulgent. Sometimes it was cutesy: Another arrival was George Kessler…Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst…. Sometimes it was intrusive, as when the author waxes philosophical upon the passengers with the surname "Luck": Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history. And sometimes attempts at the poetic veered towards the inane, as in this description of a sunrise at sea: Early on Monday morning U-20 was sailing through a world of cobalt and cantaloupe. 

But, for every useless detail and clumsy turn of phrase, Larson does unveil interesting facts. One rare bookseller was travelling with both William Thackery's own hand-drawn illustrations and Charles Dickens' personal copy of A Christmas Carol, complete with his marginalia detailing a legal matter involving the book -- almost as much as I worried for the lives of the passengers that Larson introduced me to, I wondered at the eventual fate of these irreplaceable artefacts. The details revealed during the Lusitania's sinking were as fascinating as anything I've seen on film: the image of those dead people who had put their life jackets on upside-down, now bobbing bum to the air in the ocean; the lifeboats either crushing people waiting on deck or being dropped directly onto another lifeboat as it floats down below; the little boy with measles, separated from his very pregnant mother, who was forever after haunted by a fellow passenger's testimony of seeing a woman give birth in the open sea. And the conspiracy theories that abounded after the disaster were also fascinating -- could Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) have sacrificed the Lusitania in order to draw America into the war?

Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy -- the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

Erik Larson is, reputedly, a giant in the genre of creative non-fiction, and based on Dead Wake, I'd be interested in reading some of his other work. This wasn't a total win for me, but that was mainly due to execution. I certainly appreciate the exhaustive research that went into the writing of this book, I learned a lot, and for that reason, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. Four stars for content, 3 for writing style, rounded down because I can't quite use the word "love" in this case.

And I really hate to nitpick about the over-Americanisation of this story (which is why I'll say this here instead of on goodreads, lol), but I wish this had been written be a Canadian. WWI was when our country really came into its own (it's no coincidence that In Flander's Fields was written by a Canadian), and in contrast to the scenes of Woodrow Wilson mooning after Edith Galt, our government was in war mode; our Prime Minister nearly taken down by his desire to introduce conscription to bolster the army in the face of crushing losses. While this time was truly exciting from our Canadian perspective, Larson doesn't even state how many Canadians were on board the Lusitania, lumping them in with the other "British subjects" (and it took me about ten seconds to google the number -- 360 Canadians, twice the number of Americans).

Of course, like I said in the body of the review, I don't blame Larson for focussing on what was interesting to him (and to the majority of his potential readers), but for a purportedly nonfiction tale, it smacks, somehow, of bias; a cherry-picking of facts. 

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Rufus and Alex used to speak IKEA with each other, a language redolent with umlauts and nursery-rhyme rhythms. Drömma. Blinka. Sultan Blunda! It was lingonberry of another tongue -- tart, sexy even, in a birch-veneer kind of way. Their private lingua franca.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is a collection of ten short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner, and as darkly humorous social satires, each examines some aspect of modern (primarily Vancouver-based) life, and with the use of strange metaphors and quirky observations, Gartner continuously suggests and then subverts a lingua franca with her readers. The stories here are a slightly uneven bunch -- which I more loved than not -- and I can understand that reading this collection will all come down to personal taste. 

In the line-by-line writing, I found some images to be fresh and amusing: Rufus was looking at her too intently, his chopsticks noodling in the air as if painting a devil's Vandyke on her face. And some images made little sense to me: He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe. I noticed early on that certain names, words, and phrases were repeated story to story, and I found myself seeking some significance in it. In addition to people riding Razors, wearing terry cloth shorts, reading Carlos Castaneda, and fondly remembering the nuns stealing the Nazis' distributor cap in The Sound of Music, there are multiple references to Annie Liebovitz, Pokémon, and The Simpsons. More specifically, in Once, We Were Swedes, Alex thinks of used vinyl shops as, "Places where middle-aged men in black concert T-shirts shot the shit with concave-chested kids who had rogue chin hairs and opinions about whether Muse frontman Matt Bellamy was really the late Jeff Buckley with plastic surgery", and in the next story, Floating Like a Goat, a woman writes that the great dilemma of her life was to decide, "to be an artist or be a muse?". In We Come in Peace, the pot-smoking angel says "The Dude abides with me", and in the next, the titular Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Lucy thinks of her husband, "It's all hakuna matata with him, her own Bobby McFerren and Jeff Lebowski in one loving spoonful." (These examples might sound like I'm stretching to find connections, but they were everywhere.) Most stories have characters with mullets or faux-hawks, everyone seems to live on a cul-de-sac, and if there is deeper meaning at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs, it was beyond me (and slightly distracting to notice the repetitions).

Men, in particular, are judged harshly in this collection (and I think there's no coincidence in the fact that goodreads reviews have substantially lower ratings from male readers), and particularly in the first story, Summer of the Flesh Eater, which I happened to love. What woman wants these feminised men, as expressed through their cooking?

Patel made his Lapsang souchong-smoked duck breast with pomegranate sauce. Kim made dolmades using grape leaves from his own garden. Then there was Karlheinz’s oyster foam-filled agnolotti, Trevor’s quail stuffed with raisins and quinoa, and Stefan’s saffron risotto with truffle oil and mascarpone. Marcus’s silky black cod with Pernod mole sauce (70 percent pure, fair-trade cocoa) filled the role of dessert.

Or what woman would want a man who reverts to adolescence (Once, We Were Swedes)? Who wouldn't prefer this?

Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I'm talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a "philosophy". A man who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I'm talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma.

This strangely off-kilter collection is justified by this quote from Floating Like a Goat:

The point of art, Miss Subramamium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belle lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.

And by this matching quote from an interview with the author:

"If you meet expectations, you're doing the expected, right? You're toeing the line. If you meet expectations, you're doing what you're expected to do, or what success is considered. But shouldn't you be trying to do something else? I'd rather go down in flames, quite frankly, than have a nice little book. I'd rather go down screaming in flames. You can quote me on that."

Gartner certainly doesn't "go down screaming in flames" in this collection, but she does take risks and that can be…risky. It worked for me, might not for you (especially, it seems, if you are a BBQ- and pickup truck-fearing male), and I can only rate my own experience.

I do take issue with the lower ratings given by men to this collection. One goodreads reviewer refers to these stories as "acidic, shrilly-pitched, exhaustingly wit-dependent screeds", which to my ear, sounds as paternalistic as the Victorian charge of "hysteria" used against independent-thinking women of their time. And yet...I do understand that reading is subjective, and if it takes a uterus to have identified with Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, well, I came fully equipped.

Euphoria

It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion -- you’ve only been there eight weeks -- and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.

In the Acknowledgements at the end of Euphoria, author Lily King says:

While this is a work of fiction, it was initially inspired by… anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, and their few months together in 1933 on the Sepik River of what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. I have borrowed from the lives and experiences of these three people, but have told a different story.

Mead -- enjoying the celebrated reception of her seminal work Coming of Age in Samoa -- was married to Fortune at the time of this story, and although they only spent a short time in the company of Bateson, he eventually became Mead's third husband. Euphoria imagines the meeting of these three real-life figures, in an exotic locale -- deep in unexplored New Guinea, where even the "uncorrupted" natives had enough knowledge of calaboosing and blackbirding to be wary of white visitors -- and at an interesting time: When the new discipline of Anthropology was struggling to both justify its existence as a proper science and decide its own objectives. Each of these big ideas is hinted at in Euphoria, but at a scant 258 small pages, I was left wanting more. I see that most reviewers -- both professional and amateur -- appreciate the pared-down nature of this book, and although I can become impatient with authors who cram every bit of their research into door-stoppers of historical fiction, this type of gestural and allusory treatment was unsatisfactory to me. And yet, I did enjoy what there is here.

Euphoria is told primarily from Andrew Bankson's (Bateman's) point of view, with a few interspersed journal entries from Nell Stone (Mead). It becomes clear that Bankson is reminiscing over the encounter ruefully, and as this isn't a true historical account, intimations of tragedy don't need to hold true to the biographical record. As a love story, we have the unlikely love-at-first-sight between a woman who Bankson describes as "American, quite well known but a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin" and a man who Stone says is "a teetering, disheveled, unaccountably vulnerable bargepole of a man". Theirs is a meeting of intellectual equals at a time of personal loneliness, even though Stone was then married to Schuyler Fenwick (Fortune), a professionally jealous, violent, brilliant, “tightly wound suck-arse". As a type of foreplay, Bankson and Stone have wonderfully philosophical debates about the nature of Anthropology, and this is the part that I found most interesting.

In a discussion about the degree to which the anthropologist should simply record what is seen, or conversely, ask the natives to explain their customs and rituals, Bankson insists that the people he has lived with don't have such a capacity for reflection. Stone argues that Freud was wrong when he said that "primitives are like Western children" and insists, "They are human, with fully functioning human minds. If I didn't believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn't be here…I'm not interested in zoology." Going further in this vein is a manuscript that the three read, written by Stone's former lover:

(Helen) asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our own origins.

This was truly revolutionary thought at the time, and as we attempt and fail at spreading Western civilization even today, it's a lesson we seem to have yet to learn. In an interesting moment, Bankson remembers trying to explain WWI to his native interpreter and the justification for 18 million dead -- at a time when the Australian government had outlawed all traditional, ritualised warfare in its New Guinea Territories. 

At one point, Bankson wonders, When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? With Margaret Mead's work famously falling in and out of favour over the years (she was definitely "in" when I went to University), and popular culture's evolving attitudes towards both women and sexuality, Euphoria is definitely a reflection of our own place in history; perhaps by reading it, we learn more about Lily Bank's beliefs than Margaret Mead's, and that's kind of the point: We all evaluate what we observe through the lens of our own experiences:

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

Like one of those overpriced, undersized meals at a fancy restaurant, I really enjoyed the experience of reading Euphoria, but it left me hungry and I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate the restraint as brilliance; I want some potatoes with my meat or else I feel ripped off when the bill comes. But, having enjoyed an exquisite if unfilling meal, does one then say that the food itself is unacceptable? These four stars are meant to reflect the fact that I loved what is here with the caveat that you might well leave unsatisfied.

As Mallory has become fascinated by Anthropology (and, somewhat, Archaeology), I'm really interested to see where her studies will lead her. With so few "uncontacted" societies left out there (and debate as to what "uncontacted" even means), what is modern Anthropology about? Certainly not what Margaret Mead experienced.

I remember being fascinated by Anthro at school (as was my mother) and remember much of what I read about Mead and also Napoleon Chagnon, embedded with the Yanomamo of the Amazon Rainforest. I remember my prof, a quite beautiful blonde woman, who had lived with and studied black South Africans during the height of Apartheid, and she more than hinted that her relationship with her study subjects eventually became sexual. Is that the destiny of embedded anthropologists? When I read Anil's Ghost and got the notion that a modern anthropologist/archaeologist might be employed by the UN to study modern genocides, I thought Well, that would be a rewarding career -- until Anil (although, admittedly, not the anthropologist of the story) was brutalised by members of a corrupt government. So. Yeah. Still, I remain intrigued by my daughter's dreams.

And, as for Western civilisation being considered the endpoint of cultural evolution, I'm reminded of a story from And Home Was Kariakoo: A Tanzanian fisherman was relaxing in the sunshine when an Englishman, disgusted by the display of sloth, asked the man why he wasn't out fishing. The man replied, "Because I caught enough fish this morning to feed my family."

The Englishman replied, "Then why aren't you still out there fishing for some extra?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Well, you could sell the extra, eventually hire someone to do your fishing for you, and then spend your days relaxing in the sunshine."

The fisherman understood the irony of that exchange, and where we have spread the capitalist desire for more and more, have we really done "primitive" societies any favours? I'm all for sharing medicines and sanitation and maternal healthcare, etc., but why do all societies need to be evaluated against our own (as though Western civilisation is, indeed, the endpoint of cultural evolution)? When stats say that a country survives on an average income of a dollar a day, is that truly poverty? Or is it sometimes a people who understand the value of only catching the amount of fish you need to survive? That is the question that keeps nagging me after reading Abundance recently: I appreciate that Peter Diamandis sees a successful future as one in which every human being on earth has access to the internet and a Western-style education, but won't that lead to a cultural homogenisation  that would be the antithesis of an anthropologist's goals? If nothing else, anthropologists should be a part of the debate about what the future should look like.