Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

 

The winter starts straight after All Saints' Day. That's the way here; the autumn takes away all her Tools and toys, shakes off the leaves – they won't be needed anymore – sweeps them under the field boundary, and strips the colors from the grass until it goes dull and gray. Then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the plowed fields. “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,” I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went? I stood in the window and watched nature's high-speed housework until dusk fell, and from then on the march of winter proceeded in darkness.

Reading others' reviews for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead mostly taught me that I wasn't prepared with the requisite knowledge to fully appreciate what Olga Tokarczuk was going for here: I know nothing of William Blake beyond tygers burning bright; I know nothing of the Catholic Church-backed macho hunting community in Poland; I've never read the Polish lady detective novels from the 1990s that this book is apparently satarising. As someone who could only approach this story head on, recognising nothing deep in the plot nor elevated in the writing, this was a middling experience for me: some interesting philosophical bits, but in service to nothing I could connect with. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]

Its Animals show the truth about a country. Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.

Janina (but don't call her that) Duszejko is an aging hippie; a semi-retired ex-engineer who now teaches English part-time to school children and who spends most of her year prowling the woods in her rural community of southern Poland, checking up on empty summer homes while their residents are away. She is deeply into creating and studying Horoscopes, spends pleasant evenings with a friend translating Blake into Polish, and is always on alert for poachers; collecting evidence, making official complaints, and generally finding herself dismissed as a crank and a madwoman. When some locals begin turning up dead in suspicious circumstances (could the Russian mafia be involved?), Mrs. Duszejko herself comes up with the most compelling of explanations: perhaps the Animals have become murderous, taking their revenge against interlopers in their woods. Needless to say, this theory does not improve the old woman's standing in the community. Taken at face value (as I must), the plot is interesting, not fascinating, but I did enjoy the nature writing and found all of the characters to be very well fleshed out. (The translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who rendered this into English must be acknowledged, too: at one point, Duszejko and her friend Dizzy are debating how best to translate a stanza from Blake into English, and four options are given, which the reader realises must have been translated from the English and written and rewritten in Polish by Tokarczuk, and then translated back into English, preserving the changing rhymes and the subtly different nuances of meaning of each version, as the characters discuss them. Seeing how all four versions are, in fact, true to the meaning of the original really demonstrates the demanding art behind faithful translation.)

The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system – it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.

There are different views on the nature of reality in this book – whether fixed by the stars in Duszejko's horoscopes, decreed by God in one of Father Rustle's sermons, or manipulated by a writer like the Gray Lady in her horror fiction (who necessarily, in the process, “strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility”) – but I couldn't tell if the “meat is murder” theme (which we are all blinded to in our daily lives, as in this last quote) was actually the point of this book, or if Duszejko's veganism and animal rights crusades were meant to demonstrate how out-of-step she was with a rural community that embraces hunting (and poaching and fur farming) as a traditional way of life. Obviously, Olga Tokarczuk is an Important and Celebrated author (although others' reviews have shied me off from reading her Man Booker International-winning Flights), and I will accept any suggestion that to not recognise genius here is my own failing, but I feel the need to weasel out with a noncommittal three stars.

The Wall

It's cold on the Wall. That's the first thing everybody tells you, and the first thing you notice when you're sent there, and it's the thing you think about all the time you're on it, and it's the thing you remember when you're not there anymore. It's cold on the Wall.

The Wall is set in a cli-fi dystopia that extends modern realities to an admittedly believable future – global warming has raised the ocean levels and scorched the lands of developing countries, desperate refugees risk their lives to reach safety, heartless nationalists erect a wall to protect what they have from the greedy hands of others – and while many details of the plot are interesting and compelling, it's not very literary; even “the wall” is just “a wall”, not a metaphor in sight. (Exit West covers the exact same themes but with literary devices that engage the mind and sympathies far better than this narrative hung stiffly on the seven point story structure template.) John Lanchester has certainly captured something of the current political climate, but he hasn't really made art out of it. 

Combat is like that, an undanceable rhythm: Slow, slow, slower, sudden pandemonium.

And so goes the story: slow, slow, slower, sudden pandemonium. In the beginning we are introduced to Joseph Kavanagh, a young man set to begin his mandatory two year stint as a Defender on the Wall (a ten thousand kilometre-long concrete barrier encircling the whole of Great Britain); one of three hundred thousand young people acting as Defenders at any given time. At some point in the recent past the Change occurred (whatever raised the sea levels and obliterated beaches worldwide), and having grown up in this reality, Kavanagh and his generation are resentful of their parents; those who not only allowed the world to collapse on their watch, but who are now too old to take their own turn standing guard up on the cold, cold wall. Rigorous armed defense is imperative because the Others might attack at any time: coming by sea, these homicidal would-be refugees will stop at nothing to get over the Wall, and if they do succeed, they are doomed to be put into service as the Help (little better than slaves) while those Defenders deemed responsible for the breach are fated to be put out to sea; to become “Others” themselves. Plenty of slow, but interesting, world-building, and then: sudden pandemonium. (The seven point story structure is used because it works.)

Betrayal was like tasting a liquid, the bitterest thing you've ever put in your mouth, and holding the taste just long enough to fully understand how repulsive it is, and then forcing yourself to drain the cup to its dregs.

I don't want to give away anything important, so be warned that what follows is full of spoilers (if only I had spoiler tags here): I understand that this is a commentary on the kind of nationalistic thinking that has led to both Trump's southern border wall and Brexit, but I really question the reality of murderous hordes trying to fight their way into this future Great Britain. Between the tribal scarification of the Captain's face and the Swahili used by the Help when Kavanagh asked him if his home country had a different word for “the Change” (and I did like that his answer translated as “the End”), at least some (could it be implied most?) of the Others are Africans, and sailing/rowing in small boats into the North Atlantic seems a long way to go when there is, presumably, safe haven closer and less well defended. Why would a near-certain suicide mission against a plane-boat-and-gun-patrolled concrete wall make more sense than landing somewhere on mainland Europe? I wish Lanchester had made that clear. It's also not clear just how well-provisioned Great Britain is – there's money for the war machine and luxuries for the elites, and people still have holidays and eat at pubs, but while on the one hand Kavanagh's mother laments that she can't afford to acquire Help (which are free but one must be able to afford to feed them), on the other, she's a housewife with a cleanbot and a washbot: not exactly scratching out a knife-edge existence from some dust-choked dirt farm. If we're being led to sympathise with the Others and demonise those who would shoot at would-be refugees, I wish it was more clear what the long-term survival chances were for each side. And I suppose I should acknowledge the literary irony of the main characters not experiencing psychological growth through their journey: how despicable that upon finding safe haven and boundless resources at the oil rig, Kavanagh and Hifa's first thought is to retract the ladder that had so recently been extended to effect their own rescue. While that one plot point does elevate the whole for me (suggesting that greed and selfishness are more indicative of character than experience) it's not enough for me to call the whole artful. I'm not unhappy that The Wall's Man Booker nomination led me to read it, but its inclusion on that list certainly led me to expect more from it.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World

Just as rocks hurtling at supersonic speed find it hard to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, unwelcome facts and unfamiliar ideas almost never make it through the membrane of the reality bubble. It shields us from thinking about forces “out there” that are seemingly beyond our control and lets us get on with the business of our lives.

As a science journalist and long-time host of The Discovery Channel's science programme The Daily Planet, I expected Ziya Tong's book The Reality Bubble to be a science-heavy, fact-filled look at some of the unexamined realities of today's world. But that's not quite what this is: although there are many, many interesting nuggets to be found here, this is more of a wake up sheeple call to arms against those invisible processes behind modern life that Tong herself has identified as the greatest threats to our planet – where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. It's an oddly specific thesis, repeated a few times throughout, yet it doesn't quite get fleshed out by the body of this book. With a persistent default to the Argumentum ad Naturam logical fallacy (that whatever is natural is automatically superior to anything made by humans), Tong's main point seems to be that we should treat animals and our planet better (which conclusion it would be foolish to argue against). I didn't think the book was well organised, I didn't think that Tong made any kind of persuasive argument, and without offering any solutions for a different way of doing things, I was left with the overwhelming feeling of, “Well, what was the point of that?” [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.] 

The first section of the book had the most interesting sciencey facts, and there were many bits that made me think (and which made me believe that I would enjoy the whole thing): 

We tend to forget that on the scale of living things we are massive. To us, reality may seem human-sized, but in truth ninety-five percent of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.

And:

While we can't say for certain whether reality exists independently of an observer, what we do know is that the physical world is far stranger than what our eyes perceive. For one thing, we commonly think of our bodies as separate and distinct from the external world, but modern science tells us that there is no “out there”; indeed, there is no place where your body ends and the world begins.

In retrospect, this first section on Biological Blind Spots seems intended to prove that humans are both insignificant in the scheme of the wider universe and unentitled to claim supremacy over the Earth and its other inhabitants. Part Two, Societal Blind Spots, focusses on where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes, and it is mainly about pollution and climate change and the mistreatment of factory-farmed animals. I don't eat mammals myself, but I found the phrase, “Most bacon comes from pigs that were put in a gas chamber”, to be unnecessarily provocative, but I was downright offended by the following a few pages later:

After the Second World War and the Holocaust, we may have thought that the grotesque horrors of gas chambers has been ended, but for animals the method was reintroduced in the 1980s and '90s, and gas chambers are widely used to this day. Controlled Atmospheric Stunning (CAS) is considered a humane method for rendering pigs and poultry insensible before slaughter. But inside the gas chambers themselves there's incredible suffering.

To make this equivalence between the methodical extermination of humans and the modern attempt to provide a stress- and pain-free final few minutes for the animals we eat was deeply offensive to me and Tong had pretty much lost me from that point onward. Along the same lines, in writing about pollution, Tong quotes paleoclimatologist Curt Stager as saying, “Look at one of your fingernails. Carbon makes up half of its mass, and roughly one in eight of those carbon atoms recently emerged from a chimney or tailpipe.” And in another *alarming* passage she writes:

There is one more Matrix pin-drop before we move on. Because half of the nitrogen in our food chain is now synthetically made, half of the nitrogen in your DNA comes from a Haber-Bosch factory.

I did find it surprising to read that a full two percent of the world's energy use is devoted to the Haber-Bosch process (which synthesises nitrogen from the air; which enabled the green revolution; which led to nothing but too many humans overburdening the planet; damn the eyes of Haber and Bosch both), but after the first section of the book – which stresses that every atom in our body was formed in the nucleus of some long-dead star – I couldn't get myself worked up about where the nitrogen or carbon now in my body had found itself recently. That “Matrix pin-drop” drama feels as beneath an author trying to make a serious argument as referencing the Holocaust while discussing abattoirs. 

The final third of the book, Civilizational Blind Spots, reads like your typical defense of tearing down Capitalism. The first chapter of this section laments the invention of timekeeping (because once time could be measured, the hours of a person's day could be bought and sold; which led to today's rat race) and the second laments the invention of measuring lengths (because what could be measured could suddenly be owned, from a family's plot to a nation's borders). At the end of each of these chapters, Tong points out with a dire warning that since the nanosecond and the metre now have standardised measurements based on atoms and wavelengths, they have been completely removed from the human scale, making these artificial constructs utterly invisible to us. To which I say: So what?? The book ends with the most pernicious reality bubble of all: The idea that any of us could possibly own anything (Tong apparently finds it ridiculous for a person to believe they have any say at all about where their possessions go after they die). I agree with Tong that there's something wrong with a system that sees the top twenty-six richest people have as much wealth as the bottom fifty percent, and it feels loathsome to consider ghost homes (investment properties owned in major cities by the super-rich; most of which sit empty for the majority of the year while thousands go homeless), but I don't know if the solution is to ban ownership. I'm not sure if I completely understand the point she is trying to make in the following:

Property, whether it's an object, a cow, or a slave, does not have right of movement without the owner's consent. “It” cannot change its conditions even if it's unhappy, because it has no rights. The key point here is that rights are incompatible with ownership when it comes to living things. After all, if rivers and chimpanzees have rights, what's next? Will our bacon and eggs demand freedom? Our lumber and paper? Our leather shoes and our wool sweaters? All of this life, or extinguished life, is defined as our property to do with as we please. To begin to question that fundamental authority of our ownership of life would be to upend our whole system of thinking. That's because the core tenet of our entire economic system can be eviscerated by asking one simple question, which is: What does it even mean to “own” something anyway?

I appreciate that these are all themes that Tong is passionate about, but they didn't add up to some meaningful, eye-opening experience for me. I reckon that the only readers Tong will be able to wake up with this book is those who already consider themselves woke.

Inland

You will argue with me, as your husband has, that you were all getting along just fine without me. Raising up your corn and wheat and losing your children to heatstroke. But before me, there was no aguaje where a traveler could water his horses. Before me there was no stage route, no postmaster, no sheriff, no stock association. There was nobody in Flagstaff gave a good goddamn about bringing the law to this place. People rustling cattle and people falling down cliffs and calling both an accident. Before me, we were all the way inland.

Turns out, I love a literary Western (Blood Meridian, The Sisters Brothers, Days Without End), and following on the heels of Téa Obreht's breakout success with The Tiger's Wife in 2011, I was surprised to discover that her newest release, Inland, is set in the American Frontier; surprised, I suppose, because as Obreht was born in Croatia (and set her first book there), the tropes and language of a Western might not have been 100% ingrained in her. But not to worry: from the stunning landscape writing to the natural, easy dialogue, Obreht captures time and place delightfully; and as an immigrant herself, she unfolds an incisive story in which all the characters are immigrants – either from abroad or those making the trek inland, from the Atlantic states to the Territories. Not to get political, but in a day where American citizens can be told to go back where they came from if they don't love America the way it is right now, this book is a well-timed reminder that, other than the Indigenous peoples (whom Obreht rightly identifies as tragic victims of Manifest Destiny), everyone who moved to the Frontier was an immigrant to a new land, hoping to wrestle its realities into submission to their own desires. There are the requisite saloon fights and standoffs and bronco busting – and also ghosts and visions and mysterious beasts; these make the book feel like familiar Obreht territory – and despite the fascinating and emotional plot to which they all contribute, the details serve a higher literary purpose as well. I'd say I loved this one. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.] I will endeavor to keep this spoiler-free, because the details are so surprising.

They were all moving past each other, the mother, and the little girl, and the old man, too – and it struck me, after all these years of seeing the dead, as I stood there holding your bridle and with your breath in my hair, that I had never seen more than one at a time, and had never realized: they were unaware of each others' presence. Suddenly, the gruesome way they had fallen seemed the least mournful thing about this place. They could see the living, but not one another. Nameless and unburied, turned out suddenly into that darkness, they rose to find themselves entirely alone.

Inland alternates between two narrators; one timeline covering decades and the other just one day. In the first, Lurie and his father are Balkan immigrants (Lurie doesn't remember his homeland and his father died not long after they arrived in [presumably?] NYC, so that history is lost to him, and us), and after the boy was orphaned, he had many adventures (inside and outside the law), the recounting of which gives a fascinating overview of the Wild West and those who attempted to tame it. Lurie also sees ghosts, and their aching desires can feel more emotionally touching than the quotidian harms that a living body is subject to.

Through three sons and seventeen years of motherhood, shaving had borne out as the only successful campaign against lice, but its effects were decidedly punitive – Toby looked like a deserter from some urchin militia, sentenced to bear the badge of his dishonor. What if, this time, history should fail him, leaving him bald forever? He made a sorry little man as it was: too thin for seven, soft and golden and clewed-up with doubt. Prone to his father's wilding turn of mind.

The second narrator is Nora: a weather-beaten, hard-working homesteader who is left on a drought-dry ranch in the Arizona Territories to tend to her family while her husband has gone off to find the overdue water merchant. Down to only cups of water in their home, Nora is left alone to deal with a young son who's afraid of monsters, a ditzy and delicate ward who communes with the dead, a stroke-struck mother-in-law who sneers from her corner, two teenaged sons who have stormed off in anger, and a squabble between neighbours that threatens the survival of their ranch; all while parched and isolated and worried about what's taking her husband so long.

Man is only man. And God, in His infinite wisdom, made it so that to live, generally, is to wound another. And He made every man blind to his own weapons, and too short-living to do anything but guard jealously his own small, wasted way. And thus we go on.

Both timelines are taut with mysteries that take the entire narrative to unravel; both timelines have their ghosts; and both deal with the prejudices faced by immigrants – whether they be “limey carpetbaggers”, “small hirsute Levantines”, bird-boned blonds with “Doric foreheads”, or those Mexican nationals who suddenly found their homes on the foreign side of the border when it was moved south to the Rio Grande. There are soldiers triumphant in their massacre of entire Native families, agents from the Land Office trying to harass widows off their land, kingly cattlemen, and miners with unlucky claims; this is a true Western. Touching and intense, with a fitting and fantastical collision of timelines, I found that the ending redeemed a third quarter slump, and I'm left to chew over whether to round a 4.5 up or down. Up it is to five stars because I'm just that sorry to have ended this read.

Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury

When Virginia joked about how much she and Mitz had in common, she was right. Two nervous, delicate, wary females, one as relentlessly curious as the other. Both in love with Leonard – for both, he was their rock, their “inviolable centre”. They both were mischievous. They both had claws.

Mitz is a deceptively sweet and clever biography of the marmoset rescued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and by retracing the four and a half years that Mitz lived in their company, author Sigrid Nunez is able to describe both the intimate lives of the Woolfs and the events in the larger world as Europe is drawn inexorably into a second world war, without seeming to be a serious treatise on either subject. Although originally released in 1998, Mitz is being re-released in 2019 – presumably to capitalise on the popularity of Nunez's National Book Award-winning The Friend – and I am thankful that this near-forgotten gem has been resurrected for the public: both books cover similar themes, through the relatability of pet-human bonds, employing Nunez's deceivingly spare prose; fans of The Friend (as I am) ought to delight in Mitz (which I did). [Special thanks to Zoe @softskullpress for sending me a review copy.]

There has been much disagreement as to when Bloomsbury came into being (with some members of the group insisting that it never came into being at all). Was it in 1904, somewhere between 1912 and 1914, in 1920? Whenever Bloomsbury may truly have begun, there can be no disputing the fact that by the time Mitz arrived it was soon to end. (Leonard, looking back one day, would date the beginning of the end to the death of Lytton Strachey, in 1932.) But these twilight years were anything but dim. A world in decline it might be; it was still a world in which you could hear Eliot, Forster, and Virginia Woolf discussing James Joyce.

Mitz may have come to the Woolfs late in life, but she was present in their home to witness some important events: the last years of the Bloomsbury Group, the rise of fascism (“Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?”), the writing of important works by each of the Woolfs, and the devastating loss of family, friends, and a very special dog. It feels quite clever for Nunez to have used the concept of a biography of Mitz to recount these important years for the Woolfs, but the concept is even more fitting when you recognise how caring for the marmoset demonstrates basic elements of the Woolfs' individual characters; Leonard's devotion toward wife and monkey, and a surprising degree of playfulness attributed to Virginia. In another layer of ingenuity, Nunez makes reference several times to Flush – the fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, written by Virginia Woolf herself – making plain the connection between the two books (which recalled, in my mind, the multiple layers of Michael Cunningham's The Hours; which came after Mitz). 

One aspect that really intrigued me about the writing was the narrative voice – although decidedly fiction, with events based on letters, memoirs, and diaries, Mitz reads like literary nonfiction, with Nunez seeming to insert herself every here and there in order to comment on the facts, as in: 

No one could do his or her job to Leonard's satisfaction; no one knew better how a thing ought to be done than Leonard himself; he was surrounded by boobies and cheats. (Not for nothing did John Lehmann call his memoir of his year working at Hogarth Thrown to the Woolfs.)

And:

To her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West she was Potto, and a potto is a kind of lemur – not a spaniel, as one of Virginia's biographers thinks – and a lemur, though not a true monkey, is a very close relation.

I'm intrigued by that voice (it must be Nunez herself telling us this tale) and it adds another layer of delight to an overall delightful and intriguing story. Recommended to fans of Virginia Woolf, fans of Sigrid Nunez, and fans of palm-sized monkeys. #mitzthemarmosetofbloomsbury

How to Catch a Mole: And Find Yourself in Nature

How to catch a mole, life as a molecatcher. Written in the season of catching moles, instead of catching moles. I think the only certainty I can give you about this book is that by the end you will know a lot more about moles.

There came a day when professional gardener and molecatcher (and longtime vegetarian; “life is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like”) Marc Hamer decided he had killed his last mole. Finding himself in his twilight years, and being the sort to wander with a stub of pencil in his pocket to capture the words and phrases that conjure themselves in the air around him, Hamer decided to start writing about catching moles instead of spending his time in the execution of his ancient and arcane craft. Combining nature writing, philosophy, and memoir, How to Catch a Mole is a quiet story of a quiet life, and the match of style to substance makes for a gentle and engaging read; would that we all could craft such an extraordinary artefact from our ordinary lives. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]

Hamer begins with a prologue recalling his decision to retire as a molecatcher and then the meat of the narrative commences. Each chapter begins with the continuing story of his last days as a molecatcher, includes some facts and lore about moles, chronicles earlier events from his life (primarily his time as a homeless youth who learned to live close to nature), includes some ink and woodcut type illustrations (by Joe McLaren) and ends with a related poem. Hamer's voice and wisdom are the real delight here (this is no astonishing or action-packed biography) and I'll let him do most of the talking here by way of demonstration. A snippet of one of his poems:

My body is working
my mind is idling
man-shaped, pig-like
I'm snuffling, bent
I've leaving booted footprints
in the crystalline grass
and I want to swim
to hang motionless
alone in a loch
my back tattooed with clouds
with seagulls squeaky
wheeling overhead.

A sample of mole-related facts:

Moles are immensely strong. His massive hands, each of which have two thumbs, are as wide as his head. He has a thick knot of muscle in his neck and shoulders which is as hard as a pebble. I am a working man who lives by the spade and a mole's hands are stronger than mine: a living mole can easily peel my closed fingers apart and escape.

And mole lore:

I have heard stories of moles going deep, of a sexton seeing a mole running across the bottom of an empty grave – it's a story that I have heard several times, but never from anyone who has actually seen it. The world runs on fiction.

And an example of Hamer's nature-derived philosophy:

In quiet moments like this, there is a sense of completeness: nothing else is needed to make them whole and perfect. I start my work, looking down the field. I go quiet inside; the silence seems to pour out, filling any cracks or flaws in the perfection. Once you experience this feeling of simply existing you lose the need to ask why you exist.

And what he has learned at the end of the day:

I do not know what life is, but I know what it does. Molecatching has been a life that has brought me closer to the nature of my own existence, and what it means. It has allowed me to treat the wild outside as a precious home, instead of something one is cast out into. To feel directly connected to the breath of the air that fuels me, to the soil and the sun and the rain that feed me. It has made me fit and healthy and peaceful. That connection with the earth is now part of every cell of my body, but I need to rest.

How to Catch a Mole may not be every reader's cuppa tea, but I found it lovely, wise, and candid; a memoir that feels inevitable in the smooth meshing of its various parts.

The Virgin Suicides

Ms. Perl befriended a local deejay and spent an entire night listening to the records that Lux's schoolmates listed among her favorites. From this “research”, she came up with the find she was most proud of: a song by the band Cruel Crux, entitled “Virgin Suicide”. The chorus follows, though neither Ms. Perl nor we have been able to determine if the album was among those Mrs. Lisbon forced Lux to burn:

                                          Virgin suicide
                                   What was that she cried?
                                         No use in stayin'
                                                                  On this holocaust ride
                                                                  She gave me her cherry
                                                                  She's my virgin suicide

There's something kind of special about The Virgin Suicides– special in how it's written more than the what of the plot – and it's rather mind-blowing to see that this was Jeffrey Eugenides' debut novel; here is an author who had something to say and who found a fresh way of saying it right out of the gate. This is my first time reading Eugenides (thanks to a book club pick) and I'll definitely read him again.

With that title and an opening line of, “On the morning the last Lisbon sister took her turn at suicide...”, there isn't a lot of mystery to the plot – Eugenides provides plenty of foreshadowing about the when and how of each doomed girl's end and treating those deaths as given and inevitable is rather the point. This story isn't actually about the Lisbon sisters: it's about the neighbourhood boys who watched the girls falter and fade, and despite their fascination with the Lisbons, and despite twenty years of looking back on the summer of the suicides, these boys could neither save the girls then nor understand them now. This book is a dissection of the male gaze – and written as it was in 1993, Eugenides anticipated the discussion of this phenomenon by yonks – and while the girls limped about like frail Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties, their Prince Charmings simultaneously wanted to both rescue and ravish them; ultimately finding themselves incapable of effecting either.

I liked that the narrator is a collective “we” speaking for all of the neighbourhood boys and also liked the specificity of the details that are recorded: for twenty years these boys, now men, have been collecting artefacts of the Lisbon sisters – from photographs to undergarments – as well as conducting and recording interviews with everyone from their old teachers, to old would-be suitors, to their still-grieving mother (who would only meet them at a bus station coffee shop; how pathetic is that?), and no detail or memory seems too private for the boys to feel entitled to in their search for meaning. This entitlement to trespass is apparent in the following passage about recovering and analysing the diary belonging to Cecilia; the first sister to kill herself, a year before the others:

Cecilia's diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber's assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. “Emotional instability,” he said, analyzing the handwriting. “Look at the dots on these i's. All over the place.” And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling's skin, he added: “Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.”

I love the level of detail in that one paragraph, and would have been more offended by the boys' acquisition and reading of the poor girl's private writings if they hadn't been so sincere in their quest for understanding by reading and rereading the diary:

We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or tell each other how pretty we were.  We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

I loved the big picture details of the 1970s Grosse Pointe, Michigan setting – the malaise of suburban America with its dying industries, increasingly out-of-touch churches and educators, teenagers drifting without purpose – and also the finely observed small details that popped up surprisingly like, “We lay down on the Larsons' carpet, which smells of pet deodorizer, and deeper down, of pet” or “He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.” All around, the writing delighted me and I was left with a real sense of the haunting that had been affecting the boys over all these years:

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

The Virgin Suicides both moved me emotionally and intrigued me mentally, and I can't ask for much more from a work of fiction.

Tunesday : Spirit in the Sky

Spirit in the Sky

(Greenbaum, N) Doctor and the Medics

When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best
When I lay me down to die
Goin' up to the spirit in the sky
Goin' up to the spirit in the sky
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best

Prepare yourself you know it's a must
Gotta have a friend in Jesus
So you know that when you die
He's gonna recommend you
To the spirit in the sky
Gonna recommend you
To the spirit in the sky
That's where you're gonna go when you die
When you die and they lay you to rest
You're gonna go to the place that's the best

Never been a sinner. I never sinned
I got a friend in Jesus
So you know that when I die
He's gonna set me up with
The spirit in the sky
Oh set me up with the spirit in the sky
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best
Go to the place that's the best

I haven't posted a video from the 80s in a while and it's always hilarious to me when I discover one like this that was just so bad. I loved the song back in the day, danced to it at the clubs, but I had no idea what the band looked like or how awful the art direction for its video might have been: who talked Doctor and the Medics into any of this? Hilarious.

So, to the point: This past Saturday, as part of our summer of the Grand River, we went on the Whisper to the Moon paranormal night paddle. It makes sense to me to save the details of the night for my Halloween post this year (having nothing else new and spooky to otherwise report), but I will record here that paddling a raft down the Grand River under a nearly full moon, while listening to the stories of our guides from SNIPE (two Haudenosaunee men who examine local reports of ghostly phenomena as part of "Six Nations Investigators of Paranormal Encounters"), made for an intriguing and spooky evening that fit perfectly into our overall project of exploring the Grand and its history. And the picture at the top just might be evidence of a ghostly presence. 'Nuff said about that for now, but the experience certainly seemed to suggest that something does survive death and here's hoping we all get to the place that's the best in the end.

Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

When we transcend the fear of failure and terror of the unknown, we are all capable of great things, personally and as a society. We might not always know where the journey will lead us. We might feel a burden of difficulty, but all paths lead to discovery. Both good and bad life events contribute to the fabric of who we are as individuals and as a civilization. If we continue to trek purposefully toward our dreams, into the planet and beyond, we just might achieve the impossible.

Jill Heinerth seems to have led a life of trekking purposefully toward her dreams, and despite personal sacrifices and the constant risk of mortal danger, she has built an enviable career as a cave diver and explorer, as an advanced trainer of technical diving, and as a filmmaker and writer. Part memoir, part chronicle of modern cave diving and the evolving science that allows humans to go deeper and for longer on these dangerous dives, Into the Planet is an often thrilling and always interesting book about an extreme sport and an extreme life. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]

The archway of ice above our heads is furrowed like the surface of a golf ball, carved by the hand of the sea. Iridescent blue, Wedgwood, azure, cerulean, cobalt, and pastel robin's egg meld with chalk and silvery alabaster. The ice is vibrant, bright, and at the same time ghostly, shadowy. The beauty contradicts the danger. We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story.

The book opens with a prologue set inside the iceberg known as B-15 – a large chunk of Antarctica that broke off in the year 2000, and at the time that Heinerth and two others made several unprecedented dives into its interior, it was the largest free-floating object on Earth – and right from the beginning, the storytelling is thrilling and beautifully wrought. The narrative then rewinds to Heinerth's childhood and early adult experiences, and still, it's all fascinating. When the young professional decides to leave her life and her career as the co-owner of a Toronto-based graphic design firm in order to become a dive instructor in the Caribbean, her journeys into the planet begin in earnest. As every major expedition that Heinreth and her co-divers propose require sponsors and fundraising before the fact, it's interesting to see how she eventually uses her expertise in graphic design and photography to create the brochures and promotional materials that make the eventual dives possible (and then to see how she develops her love of underwater photography into groundbreaking filmmaking). The stories of the major dives that follow are worthy of any fictional adventure novel, but I have to admit that I wasn't as interested in the parallel story of the author's strained marriage to fellow diver Paul Heinreth (but can't ultimately fault her for putting this large part of her life into her own memoir). I was intrigued by the additional pressures that the author faced as one of the few women in her field, and acknowledge that it must have been horrible to be a pioneer at the dawn of the internet, before most of us knew to ignore the trolls. As the story of an adventuresome life, this is all good stuff. 

If you cave dive long enough, you will eventually face the death of a friend. Worse, you may even recover the body of one, or hold them as their life force ebbs. In those moments, your life will be changed forever. Back then, in Huaulta, I was new enough to cave diving and exploration that I had not yet lost a close friend. In my gut, I knew that if I were going to participate in extreme endeavors like this expedition, my days of innocence were numbered.

There is quite a bit about the dangers involved in trying to dive deeper and longer than anyone has before; cave diving seems to be an extremely competitive endeavor and Heinreth knows that every time she swims into the unknown she not only risks her own life but the peace and mental security of those she might leave behind; and particularly the peace and mental security of those of her friends who might be called upon to recover her lifeless body if she fails to resurface on her own. Heinreth explains that she has the “7R” gene (that causes people to seek the dopamine rush of novel situations), but unlike those who participate in extreme “sports” for the thrills alone, Heinreth stresses the scientific knowledge that her dives have provided – and especially those dives that trace the surprising sources and underground pathways of drinking water – and that does seem to legitimise her endeavors beyond the “because it's there” ethos. Overall, this is the story of a large life, and it's told well. I'm glad to have gotten to know Jill Heinreth and I wish her success and safety in the future.

The Innocents : A Novel

They were left together in the cove then with its dirt-floored stud tilt, with its garden of root vegetables and its scatter of outbuildings, with its looming circle of hills and rattling brook and its view of the ocean's grey expanse beyond the harbour skerries. The cove was the heart and sum of all creation in their eyes and they were alone there with the little knowledge of the world passed on haphazard and gleaned by chance.

I love when an ARC opens with a note from the book's editor, giving some insider bit of info, and The Innocents begins with, “Years ago, in the archives, Michael Crummey found mention of a late eighteenth-century clergyman who had happened upon an adolescent brother and sister living all alone in an isolated cove off the northern coast of Newfoundland. When the clergyman approached the siblings to inquire into their circumstances, into how they were managing to survive, he was driven off the cove by the boy at gunpoint. The implications of that encounter would stay with Michael and eventually inspire The Innocents. In March of 2018, there were 1,500 words; by July, there were 90,000. I can't help but think the intensity of the novel's creation is reflected in the thing itself.” I quote Martha Kanya-Forstner at length here because that's all a prospective reader really needs to know: From the merest suggestion of a plot situation, Michael Crummey has dreamed up two fully-formed characters, bound by blood and the desperate quest for survival for which their parents never dreamed they'd so soon need to be fully prepared, and by richly describing their daily labour, and throwing in intermittent visits from outsiders that expand the siblings' understanding of the wider world, Crummey does right by history, literature, and the exploration of humanity. It's all here and it's all good. (Note: As I did read an ARC, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Evered and Ada Best were approaching twelve and eleven, as near as it can be reckoned, when some illness carried off their parents one winter. (The parents are present for just enough at the beginning of the story to show what kind of world these children were raised in and to underline just what they lost.) All the two know of their circumstances is that every spring their father would row out to a schooner that anchors at the mouth of their cove to pick up provisions, and then row out again every fall to deliver the season's catch of cod, picking up their winter stores at that time. When The Hope appears as expected, Evered rows out and learns the truth of their situation: The yearly catch never quite covers the cost of the flour, peas, and molasses that their father would bring home, and being thus in debt to some faraway Mr. Strapp, his agent, “the Beadle”, must decide whether the youngster before him would be capable of bringing in a sufficient haul of cod, or whether he should send the two into service somewhere until they might clear their family's ledger of debt. Evered convinces the man to give them a season to prove themselves – likely because no one else would want to take over their “enterprise” with its remote, inhospitable curve of the rock and its sand-floored, drafty hut – and the siblings begin the back-breaking work of hand-fishing, preparing salt cod, hard-scrabble gardening, and the hundred other tasks of survival. Their catch is just decent enough to satisfy the Beadle when he returns again in the fall, but it's not nearly enough to touch the debt; and so the seasons and the years go by.

Crummey, being a noted poet as well as a novelist, is a master at selecting just the right words to describe the landscape and the atmosphere and the human heart (and I am always delighted by his obscure Newfoundlandisms; “a dwy of snow” and “my little blowsabella” sound like something out of The Jabberwocky to my ear). The work and the worries are so well captured, but we never forget that these are children; these are innocents: I smiled as they played games (and especially their invented “There's Your Answer”) and it broke my heart that a snatch of a drinking song that Evered overheard on board The Hope became the only song the siblings knew (small blessings, I guess, that they even found the one to fill a dark winter's evening). [Even more heartbreaking to learn that their inlet becomes known as Orphan Cove in the greater world: Everyone knows the siblings' situation and location and no one offers help?] And naturally, as time goes by and these children grow to adolescence, forces will see them growing closer and growing apart again:

It was a torment and a respite to be away from his sister, to escape the confines of time spent with someone he would have died for and could hardly manage to speak to anymore. All the days of his life he had been inclined to her orbit and he canted toward her still though she seemed as distant as the moon. Even when they were together in the tilt she sat somewhere out of reach. Where Ada was concerned he felt he was the blinder in their childhood game, reeving around sightless with his useless hands before his face.

Between the setting's remoteness from civilisation and the richly selected language, The Innocents had a real Cormac McCarthyesque vibe that I savoured:

The sun had long set and the only light in the room was from the fire and Evered watched his sister in that darkling. Just able to make out her features though he could have touched her without moving from his seat. Her ebony ponytail only visible in motion, when she turned her head or tipped her face back to drain her mug. And he thought it was a genuine picture of Ada, that it was as true a sight as a person could hope to take of another in this life. That anything more was gossip and fairy tale, umbrage, wishful thinking.

And, of course, “the innocents” conjures the Garden of Eden, and the infrequent visitors tempt a Fall with their Books of Knowledge, and how long should the pair stubbornly cling to their Paradise after being shown how inconsequential their spit of dirt is in the scheme of the whole wide world? Interior journeys are just as fraught as taking a leaky dory out onto the open ocean and challenges to one's innocence and ignorance are just as taxing as the hard labour of keeping a body going; and to think: It all started with that small nugget of inspiration and I believed every word of what Crummey has breathed into being.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.