I’m absolutely certain that I’m now the most boring and ordinary that I’ve ever been. I’m very relaxed and surprisingly well mannered. I go to bed early, I avoid red meat and gluten, I get excited about trips to Costco. My slide to all this mundanity started in January 2019, when I tried to have a one-night stand with my high school boyfriend and accidentally married him instead.
I’ve been aware of Katherine Ryan for several years now (particularly from her appearances on British talk and game shows), and having always enjoyed her storytelling, I thought that How to Accidentally Settle Down would be a short and sweet palate cleanser between more serious fare. And it is that: not quite 50 pages, Ryan briefly summarises her romantic life — from first love, Bobby, to more adult relationships (including a long stretch with a man she calls “Then Boyfriend” [TB]; the father of her first child, Violet), and finally a reconnection with Bobby twenty years later — and while Ryan describes everything with a sardonic, comedic touch, the stories tend to somehow have both too much and not enough detail. Ultimately: I don’t know if this needed to be written, but it was an entertaining enough reading experience; still interested in reading Ryan’s longer work. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
After my daughter, Violet, was born and her arrival didn’t miraculously transform a grown man, I joked that we’d wanted a “save the relationship” baby, but we’d ended up with a regular one instead. No one in my family or friendship group had ever been a massive fan of TB, but I stand by his good qualities now like I did then. He’s not a terrible person, just a bit of a dreamer, and we were wrong for each other. My daughter, I believe, just really wanted to be born. Souls can do that, you know. They — from, I dunno, space or wherever — can match you up with a random person, drag you from Canada to the UK, strike you down with lupus, and keep you in an unsuitable relationship just so that they can exist on Earth. It’s all part of their journey, and I would never resent Violet for what she had to do to get here. If anything, I respect the hustle.
After describing her experiences with a few men that didn’t work out (nicknamed the Overlap, the Sketch Actor, the Comedy Producer [I basically have the same criteria as a giant panda for new relationships, in that if you put me in close enough proximity of a potential mate with adequate resources for long enough, we’ll eventually give breeding a go]), Ryan decided to concentrate on her career and single motherhood. I watched a video clip after reading this of Ryan being interviewed around the time the she had reconnected with Bobby and she describes how hard it was to introduce a man into the feminine, girl power space she and her daughter had forged for themselves, and I get that that must have been hard: you embrace this alternative model of, “We don’t need a man in the house to be a family,” and then you go and introduce a man into the house. Ryan doesn’t really go into this in the book (other than describing how ten-year-old Violet objected when the Danish commitment ceremony they participated in looked too much like a wedding), but as Katherine and Bobby have two more kids together now, it looks like a happy ending; and everyone deserves that.
The days are long, but the years are short, and it’s on our minds that every minute we spend caring for our family is an investment in the beautiful future we are hopeful for, when all the kids are old enough to be our friends. Having a family with my high school boyfriend, just as my hormonal teenage brain predicted, is the type of basic shit that I’ve come to live for.
“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money,” Nicola added, “or time.”
Doubt.
The Last Sane Woman is one of those confusing novels that makes my brain fire on all cylinders: format illuminates theme, messy but relatable characters unveil something true about humanity in the moment, and meaning comes as an epiphany in its aftermath. Debut novelist Hannah Regel, primarily known as a poet, writes with an impressionist’s sensibility — POV changes abruptly, long passages read as out-of-place metaphors, close-up details are fuzzy until one stands back and considers the whole — and throughout, she includes so much truth about women: about how they present themselves, their friendships, and their place in the arts. If I had written a review immediately, I might have rounded this down to four stars, but the more I think about it, the more I like it: rounding up to five. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Reading was easy. All she had to do was sit very still and the world would shift; inviting her in as a citizen, liking a tweet because it was true enough she could have written it. Watching, Nicola soon learnt, was also a form of taking part. A form that, sitting at her quiet desk in the Feminist Assembly, she felt impossible to get wrong.
On its surface, this is a story of a young ceramicist, Nicola — newly graduated from art school and feeling directionless — who (more or less on a whim) inquires at a nonprofit archive of women’s work in the arts if they had any material on those women who had had difficulty with “making things”. The archivist gives her a never-before-explored box of letters written by a female potter who had killed herself in the 1980s without making a name for herself, and Nicola is immediately fascinated by the biography revealed by this one-sided correspondence between this unnamed potter (she always signs her name in “XX” kisses) and the mysterious “Susan” to whom she bares all. The further Nicola reads, the more she recognises correspondences with her own life and work, and tension arises as she realises she might be on the brink of uncovering a mystery. But that’s just the surface plot. (I don’t really consider what follows a spoiler, per se, but I enjoyed discovering these things on my own, so, forewarned.)
I always look for the inspiration for a book’s title while reading and the phrase “the last sane woman” doesn’t appear in this one. And when I googled it, the closest I came was an article from The Guardian with AS Byatt’s review of The Last Sane Man by Tanya Harrod. As Byatt explains: “The last sane man" was a phrase used by Angela Carter to describe the potter, Michael Cardew. "Sane" in this context is associated with a simple life, and the ideal of the human as artist, art and life as one continuous work. (Further sleuthing and I learned that Angela Carter coined this phrase in her 1978 review of a monograph written on Cardew by Garth Clark.) Reading Byatt’s review, I could see where Regel took some points of inspiration from the life of this well-known male artist — and especially where it explains that Cardew attempted to shape public perception of his life with the letters he wrote; that makes for interesting speculation on how literally we are to interpret our own potter’s writings — but what I loved about this off-the-page research was that I felt like the character Nicola: acknowledging that art history is predominantly the story of men and trying to understand where our anonymous female potter might fit in.
The format of this novel, as I said above, is not straightforward. POV shifts between Nicola’s life in modern-day London, passages that she reads from the letters — that can then suddenly shift to the potter going about her own life in the London of 30-40 years ago — and scenes from the POV of Susan, and how she reacts to the letters of her freewheeling friend (whom she does name for the reader) as she deals with denying her own artistic aspirations to become a young wife and mother. And frequently, Regel writes in long, confusing metaphors:
The knuckle inside Susan, swelling with what she had failed to understand, turned purple with pride in her throat. The colour grew elbows, firmly in place, unable to interrupt. She had driven for eighteen years in the rain and she’d be damned if she unravelled now. And besides, she thought, it would be beyond absurd to alert a stranger to the black pool of solvents, dyes and fatty acids still bleeding out from under her chair and onto her feet, especially one in the middle of a monologue. She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish.
But as confusing as the POV shifts and the metaphorical passages can be, taken together, they seem to be the prose equivalent of the groundbreaking multimedia art that the potter creates:
Face taut, she begins to arrange the shards. Working urgently with chapped hands she slathers ceramic mortar onto their new joins, following the contours of their freshly broken edges with intuitive speed. This way, the fragments shape themselves. Up, up. She chews her lip in concentration. Spots of blood rise from under the skin to meet the air that flaked them. She stands back to inspect her work. What does it want? Legs. Filling her nails with dirt she quickly folds the form back in on itself, hollowing it out before it sets, and gives the next instruction. Nerves. She hurries through a box of discarded farming tools and bits of machinery, collected on her evening walks through the fields. Without gloves she grabs at a spoke to free it from its wheel, ripping one and then another like screeching hairs, her palms now streaked in scars of rust. Strange fronds. She works them into the form like whiskers. Weirdly delicate. Freshly desperate. Not even pots anymore but innervated beings.
Standing back from The Last Sane Woman, I can see where Regel dirtied her hands with muck and rust; this is art and there is truth at the heart of it, and what more could I want?
A rather grinding autobiography, isn’t it? Same old, same old, but it can’t be helped. Life, when it is happening, doesn’t care to tell you which part is telling and what it tells. That is the frustration. I suppose all this aimless rambling is caught up in feelings of pointlessness and futility and the ever-increasing sense of ageing into an absence where every addition feels like a load, wiping tables, wedging clay.
Most importantly, this is a feminist story of an anonymous woman artist, forgotten to history: the story of what she actually did, how she presented that to her best friend, how that friend interpreted events through her own experiences, and how bringing forward the forgotten stories inspires a new generation. The format does echo the potter’s nontraditional creations, and that’s what makes this art: it may not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly was to mine.
Maybe we haven’t spoken up for the others partly because of the unconscious, innate quality of our ties with them. Possibly we need the telescopic view — the distance of forgetting and the jolt of recognition as a remembrance surfaces — to know what we adore. Maybe we can only look back in longing, over time or space, when the object of our care is far away. And our old home is gone.
We Loved it All wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped it would be: part memoir, part lament for disappearing species, I found this to be a tad dense and esoteric. Author Lydia Millet does include interesting facts about her family (her father was an Egyptologist and his father a globe-trotting diplomat), herself (she used the advance from the sale of her first novel to go to grad school to study conservation), and Americans in general (“a 2021 Pew Research poll suggested half of US adults are unable to read a book at even an eighth-grade level”), and she includes interesting facts about the deadly pressures we’re putting on animals and ecosystems, but the writing wasn’t always clear to me: not clear at the paragraph level or in its overall intent (I think this is meant to prove that storytelling is an important part of activism?) I admire Millet for what I’ve learned about her here — in addition to being a celebrated novelist, she has spent decades as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson — and I can agree that she is uniquely poised to comment on the connection between storytelling and activism, but I found this to be a bit of a slog, despite being interested in the topic; other readers’ experience will no doubt vary. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
My presence in both of these subcultures is liminal — I float around on the margins. Neither fish nor fowl. Not really an activist, due to my aversion to slogans and crowds and open conflict. But also not a constant participant in the establishments of publishing or writing. Since the social and economic hub of publishing is New York, where I’ve chosen not to live. And since most literary writers also work as professors at universities, which I’ve chosen not to do.
Despite some personal stories, this doesn’t really read like a memoir; and despite some interesting facts (for instance: in 2018, the US budget for protecting endangered species from extinction was less than one-fifth of what Americans personally spent on Halloween costumes for their pets), this doesn’t really read like a call to action. And since Millet frequently makes the point that a percentage of Americans embrace anti-intellectualism as an “expression of personal liberty” (resulting in 40% of Americans believing that the sun revolves around the Earth, less than half believe that humans evolved from earlier animals, 40% believe that humans “probably” or “certainly” existed at the same time as dinosaurs, etc.), this felt a bit like preaching to the choir: nothing in this book seems designed to capture hearts or change minds. I am totally open to being shown the way forward, but I failed to find a pathway here.
If regret is the ghost of the past, for me, extinction is the ghost of the future. Now my worry is less about leaving than of what will be left. I hate the feeling. And yet that turning outward of fear may be the only thing of true value that I’ve ever learned.
I didn’t get a chance to write a review immediately upon completion of this, and nearly a week later, it’s all wisping away from me; I know it won’t leave a permanent mark, but again, if another reader finds this perfectly engaging, I wouldn’t be surprised. This is like-not-love for me, so three stars.
Advice to anybody with the plan of naming your kid Junior: going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carpet. But having a famous Ghost Dad puts a different light on it, and I can’t say I hated being noticed in that way. Around the same time Maggot started his shoplifting experiments, I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead. You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.
I see plenty of reviewers saying, “I loved The Poisonwood Bible when I read it twenty years ago, haven’t really liked anything by Barbara Kingsolver since, but since Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize I thought I’d give it a chance…”, and that was exactly my experience. From there, other reviewers are either delighted or disappointed by this novel, and I have to say: I’m leaning more towards disappointment. This does start out strong: I was enchanted by young Damon/Demon (apparently everyone in Appalachian Tennessee gets a crazy nickname), and you’d have to have a heart of coal to not be moved by the story of a young orphan as he’s bounced around an uncaring fostercare system, but as he grows older I was less moved; Demon tells us what’s happening without showing us what it’s like; it’s all grief with zero grit. Kingsolver also surrounds Demon with several sermonising/moralising characters — characters who make sure the reader draws a line between what’s happening on the ground in Lee County and the forces (political, Big Pharma, sociological) at play behind the scenes — and frankly, that felt a little condescending; I can make those connections myself. Also: Demon mentions several times that he’s “Melungeon” (Appalachian mixed race; a term historically considered a slur), and although that term is never defined for us in the book, we know that he has darker-than-white skin, green eyes, and coppery hair — and although I did feel slightly uncomfortable for this older white woman to be writing from this perspective, race never once enters into the story; it seems like a strange and unnecessary choice. Kingsolver does have a way with turning a phrase — I admired many, many sentences — and if you can concentrate on just the plot, there is a lot of heart-tugging drama to carry a reader through this long book, but I was not blown away by the overall effort. Middling three stars, and I doubt I’ll read Kingsolver again.
What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.
It’s no spoiler to note that Kingsolver wrote this as a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, and there are certainly important correlations that can be made between the uncaring state in Victorian England and “institutional poverty and its damages to children” in modern day southern Appalachia. (You may or may not like the irony of Demon commenting on reading Dickens in school, “seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.” And although I haven’t read Copperfield it did delight me when I realised that the character of U-Haul Pyles must correspond to the notorious Uriah Heep; I am sure that there are countless such correspondences that I did not recognise.) And as Kingsolver is from Appalachia herself, it makes perfect sense that she would set her novel at the dawn of the “shiny new” pain reliever, OxyContin, that seemed tailor-made for the local labouring population. As one of the secondary sermonising characters had taught Demon:
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shutthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once, we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.
As for Demon’s story: his father died before he was born and his mom ODs when he’s ten, sending him into a variety of foster homes (awful, middling, and ideal), until a football injury sidelines his progress and, apparently, his whole future. There is misery piled upon misery — good and bad people, but no one ever really looking out for the orphan in their midst (which I reckon must be how Dickens told it?) — but even when some truly horrific events happen, Kingsolver pulls back from really letting us experience them: we don’t see the tragedies, we just hear Demon’s reporting on them. I’ll put a further quibble behind a spoiler warning: I haven’t read David Copperfield but I have read Great Expectations, so when it says that Demon’s mom’s social security would be going into trust for him — and that his grandmother would look into setting up a trust for his dad’s, too — and that Demon was looking forward to getting revenge on Stoner some day, I was sure that Stoner would come out of the woodwork as Demon turned 18 to try and steal his money and that Demon would either replay the scene of helplessness with the strung out prostitute who stole his money as a kid, or finally get some redemption for that by thwarting Stoner (and hopefully get more revenge on him than that). But neither the money or Stoner comes up again. Which is not only disappointing, but weird. I do think that this retelling was clever and important in concept, but as a literary experience, I didn’t feel like Kingsolver pulled it off. Not my cup of tea. Countless good passages, though:
Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
In the wake of the high-profile trial came even more quixotic, conspiratorial, and occasionally ridiculous interpretations of the theft. When reality proves either insufficiently romantic, or appears to cloud over some darker truth, the public, and particularly overenthusiastic journalists, tend to add spice to the pot.
The Thefts of the Mona Lisa was originally released in 2011 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the theft of “the world’s most famous painting” in 1911. I’ve read an advanced copy of a rerelease (slated to drop in early 2024), and while author Noah Charney does include recent scholarship concerning the painting (in particular, Pascal Cotte’s LAM scans that seem to reveal hidden versions of the painting beneath the one we all recognise), his basic thesis is much the same: Ever since the Mona Lisa was famously stolen from the Louvre by Italian nationalist Vincenzo Peruggia (who erroneously believed that the painting had been looted from his home country by Napoleon), conspiracy theorists have suggested that what was returned to France in 1913 was a fake or a copy — or maybe the Nazis stole the painting during WWII and it was then that the French government decided to start displaying a fake — and it is to correct the “fake news” crowd that Charney outlines the known and verifiable history of the work. People looking for a scholarly treatment of this story should note that in an afterword, Charney writes: This book is conversationally written and meant to replicate my lectures. And it really does have a conversational/casual tone that sometimes jars with folksy vernacular. He also notes that since he relied heavily on books that he considers to be the best researched works on the history of Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa, he doesn't feel the need to quote primary sources here (directing the reader to investigate the footnotes of those books he references). Still: This is a fascinating story, well presented, and I’m happy to have read it. Probably a 3.5 stars read; happy to round up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It would have been all but impossible to “shop” the Mona Lisa and find a buyer. It was simply too famous. That left a number of possibilities that various newspapers put forward: first, theft by a lunatic, who had no particular motivation; second, theft on commission by a criminal collector; third, theft as practical joke, perhaps by a journalist looking for a scoop; fourth, theft by a political group hoping to blackmail the French government; and the most bizarre of all, fifth, theft to sell forgeries to unsuspecting criminal art collectors. What seemed to occur to no one was the real motivation: an ideologically driven theft to repatriate the painting to Italy.
The man who did steal the Mona Lisa in 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, was no criminal mastermind: Tired of being treated like a hick foreigner, Peruggia was a tradesman who emigrated to Paris as a teenager, and when he got a job at the Louvre, he recognised how easy it would be to remove and repatriate the great Italian portrait to his home country. Charney explains how lax the security was at the Louvre at the time, outlines the amateur moves of the thief, and details the hapless response of the Parisian police force. It was fascinating for the author to tie in the suspicion that fell on Pablo Picasso (who apparently had commissioned the theft of some ancient Iberian sculptures from the Louvre, revealed around the same time, which would heavily influence his painting), and Charney eventually shares everything that is known of da Vinci’s life and work (he spent much more time as a military engineer than as an artist). I appreciated that Charney explains that there were many inconsistencies in Peruggia’s story (which feeds into conspiracy theories), as well as explaining the inconsistencies around the French government’s tracking of the Mona Lisa during WWII (which really feeds the conspiracy theories), but even the officials from Florence’s Uffizi Museum (to whom Peruggia wanted to give the Mona Lisa after two years of unsuspected possession) had detailed photographs that showed the characteristic “craquelure” (cracks in the paint) present in the surface of the Mona Lisa, and good enough for them seems good enough to me.
Beyond proving that the original Mona Lisa is hanging in the Louvre today, Charney seems to have a secondary purpose in debunking the popular culture image of an art thief as some Thomas Crown/Dr. No gentleman-thief collector of fine art. As he writes, “every year anywhere from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand art objects (20 -30 000 in Italy alone) are reported stolen worldwide”, and this is mostly by criminal gangs and terrorist organisations (Art crime is ranked behind only drug and arms in terms of its value as an international criminal trade commodity. When planning the 9/ 11 attacks, Mohammed Atta tried first to buy a plane by selling looted Afghani antiquities in Germany.) And there’s something philosophically interesting about countless artworks going missing every year to fund criminal activity while the general public only worries about the few works that have made an impression on popular culture: and from Nat King Cole crooning soulfully about his Mona Lisa to Dan Brown’s potboiler (in which he egregiously writes that the Mona Lisa is painted on canvas instead of a poplar panel), no other painting seems to have made this much of an impression on our collective psyches.
So, there is only one Mona Lisa by Leonardo. It is on display at the Louvre. The truth behind it is plenty intriguing, including real, demonstrable secrets hidden beneath its surface — there’s no need to buy into the ooga-booga conspiracy theories.
I have been lucky enough to stand before the glass-encased Mona Lisa at the Louvre twice — once at 18 and once at 50 — and both times, I was stricken in her presence. What I saw was masterful and captivating, and if it ever turned out that what I saw was a fake or a copy, I don’t know if that would downgrade the experience in my memories. Even so: Charney — who is the expert in this — reassures me that there’s no reason to doubt the provenance of this incredible portrait. I am happy to have read this account of its fascinating history (even if some of the “ooga-booga” writing didn’t delight me).
Once upon a time, humans lived with much less interpersonal violence, without harsh patriarchal domination of women, and without systemic social inequities in general. Life wasn’t easy, but social exploitation and inequity figured much less than in later, civilized societies. That is the “Eden” of this book’s title. Our penchant for regular, organized interpersonal violence, the real worm in this apple, started after Eden, when we settled down, and our populations grew much larger.
After Eden: A Short History of the World is exactly the sort of thing I like: A thoroughly accessible trip through human history, reframing the events I was aware of through the added context of those things I had not known or considered. For example: I had heard before of Spaniards working conquered indigenous people of the Americas to death in silver mines, but I never knew that that was to satisfy Ming China’s need for portable currency in their booming domestic economy; Europe wanted silks and porcelain, but the only thing China wanted in return was silver (until, eventually, England appeared in Chinese ports with their war ships and said, “We don’t care for this trade deficit, old chaps, so we’re going to have to insist you start buying this opium we’re growing in India.”) Author (and professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) John Charles Chasteen makes countless such connections in this book, illustrating how farms led to cities and empires, and eventually, the global market economy of a handful of winners and billions of losers that we see today. Chasteen proves that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the systems we have in place today, making the incredibly urgent point that only by understanding human history can we see a different path forward: one that prioritises the well-being of everyone and the planet we live on. So whether one is interested in seeing a different way forward or simply reading a holistic story of our shared past, After Eden is stuffed with fascinating information, and I loved it all. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
What spark of genius prompted the world’s first civilizations? Seemingly, none. Little about them suggests a higher form of human life. Essentially, there occurred a confluence and concentration of earlier innovations. Only the aggregate itself was strictly new. Pottery and basketry, woven and dyed clothing, horses and carts, oxen and plows, beer and bread, oil and wine, kingship and state religion — these came together with synergy in urban life. Urban environments exacerbated social inequality but also unleashed cultural dynamism.
I think it would be impossible to summarise what is already a “short history of the world”, but I do want to note some things that I found particularly fascinating/eye-opening. I don’t think I have ever before read that what we call the Agricultural Revolution was a 10 000 year-long “diffuse and accidental” process (No one who lived during this “revolution” experienced rapid change because of it, or even knew that it was happening.) And I've never really considered that from the long ago days of the Persian Empire through the Roman and Ottoman and British, empires formed “the basic model of civilization until only two hundred years ago. It comprises most of what we usually regard as world history.” And this notion of “empire” is primarily what Chasteen is writing about here: stratified, warrior-led, focused on cities but predominantly rural, and founded on the productive power of downtrodden agricultural peasantries. Basically: Everywhere a rolling war machine discovered settled foreigners, they defeated their warriors and said, “You work for us now. Keep on farming and send a portion to our king.” But where the rolling war machine discovered foragers (a way of life no less organised, specialised, or culturally significant than what went on in settlements), the empire-builders would appropriate the land, enslave, scare off, or kill the locals, and feel good about spreading “civilisation” to the dark reaches of the earth.
I see that Chasteen has written several histories of Latin America, and from what he shares here, I would be very interested in reading more on the history of Brazil: From its accidental “discovery” by Portuguese sailors who were blown off course of the weird Atlantic “gyre” that they would employ to slingshot themselves around the southern end of Africa en route to the Silk and Spice Roads, to its transformation into the largest plantation state in the Americas (overseen, again, by the Portuguese — who, it turns out, were the biggest players in the transatlantic slave trade, enslaving half of all people stolen from Africa on their Brazilian sugar and coffee farms), to its more recent history of independence, and flirtations with socialism, monarchy, and military rule (usually with American interference trying to get their preferred guy in).
I have also never read or considered that the Industrial Revolution was initially a very localised event — centred in Northwest England and spreading barely into Scotland (due to the availability of coal, iron, and existing export infrastructure) — and was only copied abroad in Germany, slightly in Belgium and the Netherlands, and overseas, in New England. And it was the Industrial Revolution — and its need to open up new markets — that saw the spread of new empires: England colonised India not just for the resources, but to end their home-spun cotton industry and force the huge Indian market to buy British-made textiles. (This was also the point at which England outlawed slavery because, as Chasteen writes, As British industries saturated market after market in the Americas, slavery had begun to limit profits rather than guarantee them. Free workers would presumably consume more British imports.) Meanwhile, the United States built the Panama Canal in order to open up the Pacific market (“freeing” and then occupying the Philippines; sailing into Japanese ports to insist they join global markets [an idea they took to gladly as the Japanese then built their own warships and spread their own empire into Korea and China]), and as for continental Europe, this initiated the “Scramble for Africa” as newly industrialised Germany and Belgium attempted to spread empires of their own in the “Dark Continent”. (It’s no coincidence that thwarted empires at this stage led to German and Japanese aggression in the ensuing world wars.)
Random interesting facts:
- Many empires employed court eunuchs, but they have never been found in a culture that didn’t descend from herders
- “Homer”, “Confucius”, and the “Buddha” may all be collective creations, where one name stands in for an entire oral tradition
- Swahili was a lingua franca for East African traders, combining Bantu grammatical structures with Arabic vocabulary (and maybe everyone knows that, but it was interesting news to me).
- While bombing North Vietnamese cities, the Americans “used more tonnage than all of World War II’s myriad bombing campaigns put together yet failed to defeat the Vietnamese revolutionaries”
- And a line I admired: Voilà , World War One. Imperialism set it up, nationalism triggered it, industrialism made in hell on Earth.
An enormous part of world history is the raw mistreatment of half of humanity by the other half. Obviously, making common cause with the whole world is going to be hard, but we have to try. What if we teach that all our fates are absolutely intertwined, that no Earthling is an outsider on this blue marble floating in the limitless void, that we do share a common history, and a common destiny, too?
And, of course, this is the point of reading (and writing) a book like After Eden: Humans made society work the way it does today, and we have the ability to change it. The first step is to look back along the path we’ve made and see where we’ve gone wrong; I wish that history read like this in school.
We’ve never lived on earth. I point this out to him as the bus veers up the street. In the world we’re creating together, no animals exist, no seasons either. We live eight storeys up and never touch soil. We follow highways not rivers. We name our heat waves after our grandmothers. We pretend our pain is weather. We dream of houses we’ll never own. Of second homes, seventy minutes out of the city. Of well-lit rooms and comfortable chairs, of gardens, but never children. ~We Have Never Lived on Earth
Longlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize, We Have Never Lived on Earth is a series of related short stories that add up to something like a novel. Mostly told from the POV of Charlotte — the older of two girls brought from South Africa to the interior of British Columbia by their newly single mother, their dad having been left behind — these stories start off pretty slowly (mostly straightforward [what reads as autofictional] tales of an immigrant childhood), but as they go along, some of the later stories are more abstract and literary. These do add up to something all together, but as short stories (apparently, mostly previously published elsewhere), I’m left thinking they wouldn’t be very satisfying individually. Probably three and a half stars overall, not leaning towards rounding up.
Lukas said that he imagined that the moon would be a lot like Antarctica, a place he planned to travel to. It would be remote and cold, but life was certainly possible with the right equipment. If I lived there, on the moon, he meant, he promised to visit. Only if I invite you, I said. ~How to be Silent in German
After the upheaval of immigrating and a fractious teenaged relationship with her mother, Charlotte’s stories are mostly about leaving home and travelling around the world: working and writing in Germany and Crete and Amsterdam; writing a book on women artists because, as her partner Lukas accuses, she’s not brave enough to make her own art. I liked the one story from Charlotte’s father’s POV (set just after his separation from his wife and just as he learns she plans to take his kids away to Canada), and I liked the final story with a later in life visit between Charlotte and her mom, but some of the early stories set in small town B.C. were less interesting. Even the writing early on didn’t seem promising, as in House on Carbonate, about Charlotte meeting the boy with whom she’ll have her first kiss:
Kent and his friends Jake and Roy joined us and we continued south together, like the monarchs, finding security in numbers. We stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy Fuzzy Peaches and Twizzlers, which allowed me to get a better look at Kent. He was tall and thin in the effortless way of adolescent boys and supermodels. Though — Lucia often reminded me — supermodels live on diets of Coke Zero and iceberg lettuce to maintain their birdbath collarbones; teenage boys do not. His thick hair slid over his eyes making my aorta cancel all blood circulation to my head.
If the immaturity of that voice is meant to reflect Charlotte’s age at the time, it really only works as a part of this collection, where you can watch the character grow and change; on its own, it felt unaccomplished; I was never unaware I was reading a collection of short stories and considering them individually. In a later story, Cellular Memory, Charlotte makes reference to many details that occur over the course of this collection:
What have you lost?
People mostly, I tell him. Not just my parents, who are both alive, on separate continents; or Lukas, who is alive but no longer writes; not just friends, who, at one point, occupied large quadrants of my attention but now don’t seem to matter anymore. Like a film projected on water, they waver and disappear. It’s not just lovers, either, with their seed bank of memories, or the woman, sleeping in her toy tent on some lifeguard-less beach, or in her houseboat, alone, or the toddler at the train station in Montreal, or the injured octopus…
And it’s the callback details in these later stories that make this feel something like a novel, but again, I think only a few of the stories really stand on their own. I found that distracting, and in the end, while this does add up to the story of one woman's rootless life, there's neither anything particularly personal shared about her experiences or anything universal to be learned from her (so what's the point?). Good, not great.
I only knew that I was drowning. By the time I realized what was happening to me, I was already fully submerged in treacherous ocean water, riding the current. And no matter how hard I kicked back at the rolling tide, I seemed no closer to its surface. I was tossed and battered and crushed by every folding wave, my body a knot, tangled, in every direction. I opened my mouth to scream, an involuntary compulsion brought on by fear, but water forced the words back down my throat. It was cold and dark and the only end in sight was my own.
I had a lot of driving the other day, and as it was the day before Halloween, I decided to listen to a horror novel on audiobook. I chose Twelve Residents Dreaming because it fit the bill, and although I later learned that this is the seventh and final volume in author William Pauley III’s “Bedlam Bible” (an author and series I haven’t read before), it totally stands on its own. In brief: Anacoy Marlin finds himself shipwrecked, and just as he is about to succumb to drowning, he discovers a raft that brings him to a mysterious skyscraper in the middle of the “bell dark sea”. There, he finds the remains of twelve former residents of the building, and as he accesses their memories (or are they dreams?), the reader is treated to twelve weird and horrific short stories. There is a huge range of fantastical experiences described — smouldering children and poisoned blood and a mental time machine — and throughout, it’s the building itself (known as the Eighth Block) that poses the greatest danger to hapless visitors. This was perfectly suited to my needs for the day, so I don’t want to pick apart the writing (beyond noting frequent use of cliches; every noun has an adjective, every action is described adverbly), and will simply say that this was dark and inventive and I was never bored. (Note: I listened to an audio ARC through NetGalley and needed to transcribe my quotes; apologies for mistakes, they are meant for flavour only.)
This is madness. Pure madness, I thought. Then unconsciously gripped one of the skulls at its eye sockets as one would do with, say, a bowling ball, and as soon as my fingers slid inside, a barrage of bright images flickered in my thoughts. Telepathic messages straight from the hollowness of the skull. The quick flashes of light startled me, causing my hand to retract and the light to instantly fade. Was this dead relic communicating with me? Nonsense, I thought. But despite thinking it to be nonsense, I once again pushed my fingers as far back into the sockets as they’d go. The flashes of light returned, but that time I was able to make out clear images inside my head, as if they were flickering onto the wall of my closed eyelids. They were displays of memories, or perhaps dreams, I hardly knew the difference. And each skull had its own story to tell.
I did like the way that there’s a progression of flooding in the stories: Early stories mention torrential rainstorms in the city’s south side, and then localised flooding around the Eighth Block, rain pouring inside the windows, until whole floors are flooded; something leads to this building standing alone in that bell dark sea (I really did like that phrase). I also liked the way that stories sometimes intertwined (especially that of the tattooed man, the mysterious blue flowers, hallways full of salt, and the discovery of the camera). These stories aren’t super spooky, but they have a definite Twilight Zone vibe, and as a collection, they compose an epic tale across time and space. I’m glad I chose this collection to fill my hours and I am grateful for the early access.
A note on the audiobook experience: I see that a lot of reviewers on Goodreads especially liked Connor Brannigan's narration — with so many different characters telling their stories (the shipwrecked man, the twelve residents and the people they interacted with in their tales) Brannigan probably needed to come up with over thirty unique voices, and while I agree that that takes a lot of skill, some of the voices were distractingly not like real and natural voices (gravelly or breathy or high pitched) and that was...distracting.
