Mind Picking : Farewell 2020 (and good riddance!)

Perhaps the best indicator of how uninspiring this year has been can be found in the fact that 2020 saw my fewest number of blog posts since I began this project; and not all of that can be blamed on the fact that I read and reviewed the fewest number of books since starting here in 2013. And, really, how sad is that? The pandemic forced me to be off work from March to September, and in those long months, I neither read more than ususal, nor spent those hours in contemplation and explication of this ordinary (and therefore examinable) life. Living through a pandemic hasn't made me feel particularly sad or scared or depressed with my existence; everything has just felt paused and I found myself reacting to that without enthusiasm or inspiration; this was not a "gift" or chance to "reset". I did not declutter my house; I did not learn a "quarantine skill"; I did not improve myself at all. And when I did return to work - in the decidedly nonessential role of "bookseller" - I was delighted to be around my coworkers again but found myself emotionally drained by my interactions with the customers; we literally had people saying they would go home and get guns and come back and shoot us if we didn't let them into the store without masks. People yelled at us about their rights, people employed nonsensical talking points that sounded like they came out of internet chat rooms ("this isn't private property if the company is publicly traded", huh?), people demanded our names and took videos of us explaining company policy. And while that didn't make me feel particularly sad or scared or depressed with my existence, it certainly made me feel disconnected from the community at large: No matter what anyone believes about the coronavirus or how serious it is, we can't get out of this stalemate, this paused existence, if we don't all work together to make it go away; and I don't trust everyone to work together. So, now I find myself in another month (at least) of lockdown, I finally feel recovered from the added stress of COVID rules at Christmas in retail, and while I still don't anticipate me using this break for anything life-altering, I do intend to approach the new year with some bright-faced optimism; as The Beatles once sang:

I have to admit it's getting better

A little better all the time

(It couldn't get much worse!)

 

So, as in previous years,  I'll begin with a recap of my top reads:

Top Ten Fiction Released in 2020

Apeirogon

I wish this had won the Booker; the kind of read that could literally change the world. (Especially poignant as I had read this immediately after a trip to Israel.)

Things in Jars

Absolutely meshes with my tastes.

Even the Dogs

Between its gritty material and surreal language, this was a mind-altering read.

Shuggie Bain

Shuggie himself was such a bright light that he elevated this story (based on the author's own childhood) above what could have been mere misery porn.

Mayflies

Engaging story but I was probably most affected by its setting in the years of my own early adulthood; just so personally relatable and enjoyable.

Bestiary

This poetic book must have really snagged something in my subconscience; I keep thinking about and recommending this one.

The Rain Heron

Another book that was more about the language than the plot (although its mythical qualities also spoke to me).

Summerwater

Love the nature writing and what I learned about the Scots (and especially around Brexit).

Summer

I especially liked how this wrapped up Ali Smith's Seasonal Series, and in that same spirit -

Jack

I was impressed by what this novel added to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Series.

I felt very fortunate that while in the first lockdown - with libraries and bookstores closed - we were encouraged (by a company-wide email) to take advantage of NetGalley, as they represent many publishers who automatically approve ARC requests from booksellers. I had tried to request a few books from them over the years - always denied - so it was very satisfying to make a new account as a bookseller and have so many books available to me before their release dates; and while I've never really been a fan of reading on electronic devices, I am happy that there's no physical waste left over from the forty-five books I've read this year through NetGalley. One of the consequences of choosing so many of my books through their website, however, is that I read quite a bit more science-related nonfiction this year (most of my nonfiction in previous years tended to be memoir and I wasn't much drawn to the life stories I saw on the website) and that's a bonus too because I found so many reads that felt mind-expanding. And so:

Top Five Nonfiction Released in 2020

The Human Cosmos

The book that most filled me with awe this year, and isn't that the point of living? And reading?

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

A persuasive and engaging read; why is this controversial?

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

Not just the latest on Neanderthals but why their story matters to modern humans.

(Honourable Mentions in the NetGalley Science Category: Underland: A Deep Time Journey and The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time (so many rocks in each!); Vesper Flights and When Birds are Near (so many birds!); Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (even if I push back against Frank Wilczek's insistence that there's nothing special about human consciousness) and in counterpoint, Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect. )

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

Another NetGalley find, this felt like an essential addition to my knowledge base.

Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

Because who didn't need some laughs this year? (And I genuinely laughed.)

I read more books in translation than usual this year (mostly through NetGalley) and I thoroughly enjoyed: The Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann at the Hands of Her Sister Fanny (from Hebrew, coincidentally read in Israel);  Olav Audunssøn : I. Vows (from Norwegian); The Discomfort of Evening (from Dutch); Tyll and Qualityland (both from German). I think what I learned is that if I find myself bored of reading the same North American MFA-generated fiction over and over again, I ought to look for something new from other countries. (But didn't I already know that? What's most surprising about my reading this year is how little effort I put in to reading the nominees for the big literary prizes; disappointed too many times in the past, I guess.)

When we first went into lockdown, I went to the list I generated last year from 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List and ordered a few older books from it, and for the most part, I found myself enchanted by: Eyewitness to History; The Worst Journey in the World; Independent People : An Epic (translated from Icelandic); The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography and Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (two books that linger linked and similar in my memory). And five more honourable mentions for  older fiction:  Butcher’s Crossing (such a pity John Williams only wrote three novels and this was the last I needed to read); Possession : A Romance; Madame Bovary; A Country Road, A Tree (elevated by following up with Waiting for Godot); and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (surprised myself that I liked this so well; book club is tonight and most people have already said that they didn't bother reading it, sigh.)

*****

While looking at my farewell to 2019, reminding myself how I like to format these things, I noticed that all my pictures from last year are messed up - I don't know if that's a Blogger problem, a me problem (likely), or because I don't host my pictures on some third party/cloud-related site and they're no longer "found" in my laptop's memory, but since I can't be arsed to go back and fix that, I won't be arsed to add photos here this year; and that's just so 2020.

I will acknowledge that this year started with a bang: the trip that Dave and I took to Israel and Jordan in January was simply amazing. Humbling historical sites, wonderful guides, and friendly fellow travellers, we knew that we were incredibly lucky to have had another "trip of a lifetime" and we also knew that we would be going on more in the future. Slightly ironic that it was in the executive lounge at Heathrow on the way home that the BBC news channel first made me aware of this new "coronavirus"; some health crisis in China that didn't have much to do with me; we continued to talk about where we should go next. Over the next month, we made some plans (Kennedy was going to do the Mud Girl Run with me and her Aunt Rudy) and bought tickets (we were all going to see Ringo Starr at Casinorama; I got tickets for Ella and a friend to see Kinky Boots) and made reservations (we were going to go white water rafting in August; stay in the seaside oTENTik Kennedy always ogled in Cape Breton) - and a month after that, everything shut down and all of our plans got cancelled. Mallory and I were furloughed from our jobs, Kennedy and Zach continued to work from home, and Dave never stopped going to the office (their plant would eventually have the biggest COVID outbreak in the Region - which the local news made a huge deal out of despite Dave and the rest of the management team putting industry-leading protocols into place and despite Public Health having zero recommendations for industry at the time; no one died from the coronavirus at the plant, although no one could have known how that whole awful situation was going to play out) and we all soon set in to our new reality.

I made one brief post in May about how (lightly) quarantine was affecting me and those around me, and incredibly, that's all I wrote about the pandemic or anything else that happened this year? Because something else BIG did happen. In my Halloween post this year, I briefly mentioned the fact that since we couldn't go down to Nova Scotia to visit my parents this summer (incidentally, Kennedy, Zach, and I did drive down there in February for a weekend visit, which even pre-pandemic, I apparently didn't think was interesting enough to write about here), we rented a cottage outside of Delta, Ontario for a week (we would usually go to Sauble Beach, but the mayor was asking people from out of town to stay away). We had a lovely, cottagey time - kayaking and card-playing, campfire singalongs and boot camp in the isolated yard - and on our last day there, I opened the real estate listings website because I knew this place was afor sale and we were enjoying it, and as was my habit, I also looked at the cottages at Sauble Beach. I have written many times about the cottage at Sauble that Dave grew up with - and the villainous role that his aunt played in selling the cottage out from under his parents - so I was shocked to discover that that property (now with a four bedroom house built on it) was also for sale. I walked into the cottage, where Dave was cooking breakfast, and I said, "So I found the real estate listing for this place online. Wanna guess how much it is?" He guessed, I told him the right answer, and then I said, "Oh yeah, and your family's property at Sauble Beach is for sale." His jaw dropped. "How much?" he asked. I told him. "Too bad the timing just isn't right. I guess that wasn't meant to be," he said. Dave had just paid cash for a new car the week before - pretty much as soon as we realised that there was no point in looking for a cheap cottage at Sauble because there was just nothing for sale - and we knew the "cottage" wasn't meant to be. Except it was.

We said, "Why not?" and made an appointment to go see the place the following Sunday (as a vacation rental property, viewings were only scheduled for Sundays and we were the first people to go through it; even though we had rented this house before and knew exactly what it was), and despite having no idea what the bank would say to us, we said, "Why not?" and immediately made an offer conditional on financing. And when we went to the bank, they said, "Why not?" and fronted the entire mortgage and now Dave and I own two homes; the one at Sauble Beach to be used as a vacation rental property (and family retreat) until Dave retires and we move up there. I didn't write about all that here, but this was my facebook announcement:

Well, that’s retirement sorted: Dave’s family had a cottage at Sauble Beach when he was growing up and he spent many glorious summers there. The cottage eventually left the family, as cottages do, and a house was built on the property. We happened to notice recently that this house was for sale, and we bought it. The place where Dave grew up, at the beach where our own kids made many happy memories of their own, is where we will grow old together. We are ecstatic to bring this full circle and look forward to making new memories at everybody’s “happy place”.

(There are plenty of great pictures with that post, but like I said, I'm not going to be arsed to reproduce them here and then have them disappear. My only concession: The picture at the top is of the house.) Dave is not a religious man - although he is spiritual in his own way - but he absolutely believes that his dead grandparents - who originally owned this property and built the small cottage that has been moved to the backyard as a bunkie - have been karmically righted. The night we were waiting to see if the offer would be accepted, Dave went out back of our house, looked up at the night sky, and wondered if they knew; and Dave, my unreligious husband who would swear that nothing survives death, knows he felt a light pressure on each of his shoulders, as though his grandparents were laying their hands there in approval. The most remarkable part of this story is that the bitterness he had harboured against his aunt for the entire time I've known him - the cottage was sold just the year before we met; this was not only Dave's tragic origin story as presented to me but the seed of spite he raised our children on; I can not overstate this - that bitterness is gone. Dave has been reaffirmed in his belief that everything happens for a reason and he has been forced to acknowledge that, being the path that led to us owning this property (and especially while that bunkie still stands), everything that has gone before has been inevitable and the path that led to us. Dave forgives his aunt. This is a fairytale ending.

Looking through my index of posts for this year, it's incredible to me how little I wrote about what was going on - but there was really not much going on. I know I wrote in my farewell to 2019 that I was generally happy, feeling more social connection than usual with boot camp every morning at the gym, monthly book club meetings, and socialising with my coworkers; all of that was a vast improvement over where I was when I started this blog, but I lost all of that this year. I haven't been to the gym since March (but do daily boot camp videos at home), we do our book club meetings by Zoom call and they sure aren't the same, and even though I did eventually go back to work, policing anti-maskers was never the job I signed up for. Every day during the quarantine was much like the day before, and other than feeling bad for my mother-in-law (in a nursing home and unable to have in-person visits - other than some distanced ones in the home's parking lot during the summer months), and then Rudy was able to get essential caregiver status and go in for a few visits, until Dan and her Dad both tested positive for COVID just before Christmas. Now, I was feeling pretty sad about Christmas this year - sad about distanced porch present drop offs with my brothers, no parties, no big dinner - but I absolutely cannot imagine how Rudy was feeling. Dan got very sick, could hardly get out of bed and was labouring to breathe, and her Dad was short of breath and had zero energy, and on Christmas Day itself, now in quarantine as well and not able to go visit her Mom in the home as she had planned, Rudy was taking care of both Dan and her Dad, not knowing if they would live. I pictured that scene pretty much as Rudy would later describe it to me, and while I wanted to tell myself that I had very little to be sad about - I have had remarkable things happen for me this year and have (so far, knock wood) avoided COVID-related tragedy - it's still hard to shake the sadness, the feeling of living on pause (priveledged problems, I know, but this feeling of being paused is the only thing that feels real to me right now). Another fairytale ending: Dan and my father-in-law are both now symptom-free, and Rudy got negative results for the COVID test she took yesterday. And that's a very happy thing and what can fuel the kind of optimism I want to bring into 2021.

“For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.”

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Gutter Child

 

I stop, and when Josephine turns to me, I whisper the only words I can manage, my throat still thick and tight: “I don’t belong here. You’re all...I’m not...I’m not a Gutter child.”

I was handed an ARC of Gutter Child and told I ought to read it because it’s going to be a BIG and IMPORTANT book in the new year. I now understand that its author, Jael Richardson, is the founder and director of FOLD (the Festival of Literary Diversity) and she is an impassioned speaker on the fundamental necessity of encouraging and promoting diverse voices in literature — a movement I am 100% behind — but I’m afraid this book doesn’t read as BIG or IMPORTANT. There is social commentary, but it comes off as very basic; I think this might be better marketed as a Young Adult novel, and not only because the main characters are all teenagers and the writing is a touch melodramatic, but because this would be an excellent prompt for a discussion about the history of institutionalised racism — vile institutions like slavery and apartheid — in the same way that The Marrow Thieves provided teaching opportunities around residential schools and the history of racism against Canada’s First Nations. I want to stress that as a YA novel, this could be quite a valuable eye-opener, but it didn’t add to my own knowledge or understanding of the Black experience and the contrived melodrama didn’t reach me emotionally. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Some spoilers beyond.)

When I drew pictures of Mother and me, I used Peach for her and Chestnut for myself. “Why is your skin named after something soft and sweet and mine is something hard and bitter?” “Because you are so much tougher,” she said. I thought that was a very good answer. And maybe it’s true. But I am forced to be tough. It takes a particular kind of strength to exist in a world where you are not wanted that doesn’t feel like strength at all. Like giving up or giving in would be easier, smarter even. Maybe this is my chestnut, my toughness. The fact that I am still here.

Gutter Child opens with our main character, Elimina Dubois, being delivered to a boarding school. It is immediately apparent that whatever society this is set in (I found it helpful to imagine an alt-history of maybe Australia), people are divided into the white-skinned Mainlanders (who are in charge) and the Black “Gutter folk” (who do all the real labour). Elimina had been raised to this point outside of the system — by an adoptive Mainlander mother who died suddenly when Elimina was fourteen — so the trajectory of the novel is pretty much her being put into different settings and situations where people can tell her the true history of this country and her own people. Spoilerish: European colonisers came to an island country hundreds of years earlier, finding it rich in resources and inhabited by “primitive” Black people. The settlers claimed the best coastal land for themselves, forced the natives to sign treaties they didn’t understand, and then moved them inland, charging the displaced folks for all the necessities of life now that they no longer had access to them. As the coastal cities grew richer and the self-named “Sossi” people poorer, there was a great rebellion which the settlers barely squashed, and the cost of which the Sossi people are still paying off, many generations later. Immediately after the rebellion, all of the Sossi people were moved to an offshore island (called the Gutter) and every baby there is born owing a share of the original debt of their people. Gutter folk work at menial jobs, hoping only to live their lives without adding to the debt of future generations, but there is one glimmer of hope: Gutter children can be sent to Mainland academies, where they are trained in trades and service jobs, and if they get good jobs upon graduating, there’s a possibility of paying off their academy fees by the time they’re sixty or sixty-five, thus gaining “Redemption Freedom” for themselves and one family member from the Gutter. Very few people earn Redemption Freedom, and it’s unclear where they could happily live if they did — there’s one fabled Black community, “the Hill”, but it might not be what it seems — so while every Gutter child who grows up on the Mainland knows that the white people there fear and despise them, the dream remains to join their ranks as “free” people. In this way, the society blends slavery and apartheid, and when the Headmaster of the academy describes it to Elimina as the envy of many other countries (if only they had the ability to start such a nation from the ground up as the Mainlanders did), I wouldn’t call that far-fetched; I would never argue that the racism that would lead to this kind of society doesn’t exist; that it didn’t exist at the beginning of our own country. 

Gutter folk are poor in position, but don’t nobody do family like us. And we don’t have to be family to be family, if you know what I’m saying. Wherever we are, we find family.

Despite believing that her adoptive mother had loved her and had done her best to protect Elimina from the horrible Mainlanders outside their door (Elimina wasn’t allowed to attend school or eat in restaurants, she couldn’t even walk down the street with her mother without suffering abuse), a main theme in the story is that Black folks should stick with other Black folks; that supporting one another within the Black community is more important than trying to gain acceptance in the white world, which leads into the sad irony of Gutter parents sending their children off to Mainland academies, believing that the freedom they might eventually gain is the most important thing in life, while these children yearn to be back home with their families. The ending looks like it could be setting up for a sequel that will redefine the meaning of “free”, and while I think that could be interesting, it also added to my YA/The Hunger Games vibe.

I’ll say again: Gutter Child really felt YA. Elimina has a lot of angst trying to fit in at the academy and make friends, there are awkward (and non-explicit) romantic interludes, the history and social systems are revealed in a series of infodumps, and every chapter ends on a squishy bit like this:

There’s a long quiet where I just sit and think, listening to the wind. Part of me wants to be angry, but part of me wants to forgive. And I lift my knees and put my head in my hands because I don’t know which feeling to let in.

And I’ll say again: if this is marketed as YA, I think it is an easy and relatable enough read that high school students would find it interesting, and even more importantly, I think they might find it illuminating. This is not meant as a slight against YA, but I don’t feel like I was the right audience for this.

How to Pronounce Knife

 

The child started reading and everything went along just fine until she got to that word. It was only five letters, but there might as well have been twenty there. She said it the way her father had told her, but she knew it was wrong because Miss Choi would not turn the page. Instead, she pointed to the word and tapped at the page as if by doing so the correct sound would spill out. But the child didn’t know how to pronounce it. Tap. Tap. Tap. Finally, a yellow-haired girl in the class called out, “It’s knife! The k is silent,” and rolled her eyes as if there was nothing easier in the world to know. ~ How to Pronounce Knife

Right from the start and this title story (in which a little girl from Laos attempts to protect her immigrant parents from the things that they don’t know about their new country that make her life a little harder, “She didn’t want to lie, but there was no point in embarrassing her parents”), I was prepared for Souvankham Thammavongsa — an award winning poet and short story writer who “was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto where she now lives” — to teach me something of what it is to be an immigrant or refugee from Laos, now living in North America. And I was excited for that because I don’t remember ever reading or hearing about the Laotian experience before. Most of these stories do have a nugget of that experience in them, and many have universally relatable domestic scenes, but while the writing was clear and the reading was easy, nothing about this collection really felt strong or important enough to explain why How to Pronounce Knife won Canada’s richest literary award, the Giller Prize, this year. There were a handful of four star stories at either end of this collection, a couple I would give two stars, and the vast majority were nice, three star reads; three stars overall (and I will be looking for the novel that Thammavongsa is apparently now working on; I’d love a longer visit with any of these characters.)

She hated that he called her by a nickname. It made things feel intimate between them in a way she didn’t want. The way he said, “Dang,” it was like a light in him had been turned on and now she had to be responsible for what he could see about himself. ~ Paris

An interesting meditation on beauty and otherness, and especially the value (and cost) of the Western ideal of beauty as seen by an outsider (“In that moment, Red felt grateful for what she was to others — ugly. It’s one thing to be ugly and not know it. It’s another to know.”)

That’s the thing about being old. We don’t know we have wrinkles until we see them. Old is a thing that happens on the outside. A thing other people see about us. ~ Slingshot

Aging is just another form of alienation.

She held this little radio up to her ear like a seashell and listened. The host always spoke briefly between songs and there was the occasional laugh. A laugh, in any language, was a laugh. His laugh was gentle and private and welcoming. You got the sense that he, too, was alone somewhere.~ Randy Travis

The things we use to fill the lonely voids can sometimes take us over; perhaps those that feel a cultural void from dislocation are more at risk of losing themselves.

You’ve got to not have dreams. That woman ain’t ever gonna love a man who does nails. That’s not real life. You and me here, we live in the real world. You’re given a place and you just do your best in it. ~ Mani Pedi

The adult children of Laotian refugees, a retired boxer takes a job in his sister's beauty salon and refuses to surrender to his new place in the world.

Dad parked the car and told us we were to walk from house to house dressed like this, then yell, “Chick-A-Chee!” at the person who answered the door and hold out our open pillowcases for them to fill with all kinds of candies. I did not believe him. I was certain that he had really lost his job and what we were doing was part of his plan to send us away, something our parents often threatened when we were misbehaving or we wanted something they didn’t have the money for. I wanted to cry, but I saw how my brother was looking at me — like he needed me to be brave for the both of us. ~ Chick-A-Chee!

A really sweet slice-of-life story about a refugee family trying to fit in with new customs (and the Dad who, for once, gets it absolutely perfect.)

Look, I know these things. You just can’t have a Lao wedding without Lao letters on the invitation. And you have to have your real given name on there. Yeah, it’s a long name — but that’s your name. Why would you want to be Sue when your name is really Savongnavathakad? ~ The Universe Would Be So Cruel

A man who “knows things” about how the universe really works must accept extra responsibility when things don’t work out close to home. Another interesting slice of life with a Dad doing his best in unfamiliar territory.

I thought of what my mother knew then. She knew about war, what it felt like to be shot at in the dark, what death looked like close up in your arms, what a bomb could destroy. Those were things I didn’t know about, and it was all right not to know them, living where we did now, in a country where nothing like that happened. There was a lot I did not know. We were different people, and we understood that then. ~ Edge of the World

A heavier story: you can run from your past but you can’t run from your self.

He wanted to remind his wife that his name was Jai. It means heart in Lao! he wanted to yell. But then she would just remind him how men in this country do not raise their voices at women. Or tell him to practise his English. “No one here knows jai means heart,” she would say. So what if that’s what it means? It doesn’t mean anything in English. And English is the only language that matters here. ~ The School Bus Driver

A story of a refugee husband who becomes lost as his wife finds herself and her happiness.

When you’re a mother, you create a life and then you watch it go on its own way. It’s what you hope for, and want, but when it happens, it happens without you. ~ You Are So Embarrassing

The gulf between a refugee mother and daughter increases exponentially as the one tries to get by and the other tries to fit in.

“The first time a guy says ‘I love you,’ your legs will pry themselves open like this.” She held up two fingers and spread them slowly to form a peace sign, and as she did this, she made the sound of a door opening on rusty hinges: “Ewwrrrkk.” Then she shut her eyes tight, threw her head back, and laughed at her own crudeness. The sound of her laughter came mostly from her throat, like a dry cough. ~ Ewwrrrkk

An eight-year-old girl gets life advice from her great-grandmother (which might have seemed mischievously useful to the old woman but no longer applies in the real world) and this one was by turns kinda funny and just sad.

What was the difference between someone who lied about love and someone who didn’t love you? Nothing. ~ The Gas Station

Not necessarily an immigrant story, this is about the short and dark fairytale-ish relationship between an ogre-like man and the (socially) invisible woman who would be monstrous.

Dad always talked about life as if it spilled out all at once and we couldn’t have time to think or do anything about what was going to happen to us. He talked like he had to tell me everything now because we’d never see each other again. I’d roll my eyes at him, but that only made him go on. It always circled back to how different Katie and I were, and how I wouldn’t get the same things she got in her life. ~ A Far Distant Thing

Maybe the refugee Dad is right this time and the same childhood circumstances don’t guarantee the same adult outcomes for two friends of different races.

Me and my mother were the only women. There were about fifteen men, and they were all Lao like us. We were what people called us — nice. I had seen these men before at the card parties my mother went to. She cooked meals with their wives in the kitchen. When we all sat down to eat on those nights, everyone would talk about their work, their bosses, how hard it was back home, how they all came to the country we live in now — but no one cried or talked sad. They all laughed. The sadder the story, the louder the laughter. Always a competition. You’d try to one-up the person who’d come before you with an even more tragic story and a louder laugh. But no one was laughing here. Every face was serious. ~ Picking Worms

Many of these stories are about the hard, manual labour that the Laotian community is forced to engage in — doctors and lawyers showing up to twelve hour factory shifts in blue overalls as though their former lives counted for nothing — and while “picking worms” is referenced in the first story, this one shows what that job entails: the back-breaking work, the callous managers, the Laotians comporting themselves with industriousness and dignity.

The last story is also the only one with a brief scene showing a family’s escape from Laos, and it was so completely engaging that I recognised it as what feels missing from the collection — this is the first fiction I remember reading from a Laotian writer and I’m left not knowing much more about that culture, in the old country or in the new. Each story does stand on its own as an interesting little nugget, but the collection doesn’t add up to a motherlode. I wanted more from this.

Piranesi

 

Piranesi. It is what he calls me. Which is strange because as far as I remember it is not my name.

Like other readers, I picked up Piranesi because I had loved Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell many years ago; and like other reviewers, I’ll stress that most of the charm I found in this read was a result of going in with no idea at all of what to expect from it. So to remain as unspoilery as possible: Piranesi begins as a mysterious adventure tale, and as details are slowly meted out, Clarke uses her invented world and empathy-invoking protagonist to make some fairly profound statements about the meaning of life and what it is to be human. Piranesi is not a magic-filled alt-history like Jonathan Strange (this is definitely not just more of the same) but Clarke’s writing is just as evocative, imaginative, and entertaining this time around. Simply a lovely read.

In the early evening I went to the Eighth Vestibule to fish in the Waters of the Lower Staircase. The Beams of the Declining Sun shone through the Windows of the Lower Halls, striking the Surface of the Waves and making ripples of golden Light flow across the Ceiling of the Staircase and over the Faces of the Statues. When night fell, I listened to the Songs that the Moon and Stars were singing and I sang with them. The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly.

To be slightly more spoilery: In the beginning we meet this “Piranesi” and learn that he lives in a vast complex of marble hallways, chambers, and vestibules — some flooded with seas and tides, some derelict, some up in the clouds — each with countless damp niches filled with statues of characters from some familiarish mythology. Piranesi spends his days split between survival tasks (fishing, mending tattered clothing, gathering and drying seaweed for fires) and a scientific exploration of the further reaches of this House and its Features, and twice a week, he meets with The Other: the only other living occupant of this world; an unfriendly man engaged in his own quasi-scientific enquiry into arcane knowledge. The story is told as a series of Piranesi’s journal entries; an organic and charming format — in which he does his best to report on everything of note and work out the bits of life that confuse him — and while the reader may regard him as naive and vulnerable (his does not seem like an easy existence), Piranesi himself seems delighted with the House and how it provides for his needs. As information reaches Piranesi that threatens an existential crisis, there’s a real sense that this is the forbidden knowledge that might cause his expulsion from Paradise:

When I tried to retrace those steps my mind kept returning to the image of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight, to its Beauty, to its deep sense of Calm, to the reverent looks on the Faces of the Statues as they turned (or seemed to turn) towards the Moon. I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.

After finishing Piranesi, I learned that Clarke has been suffering from an undiagnosed chronic condition (maybe Lyme Disease? Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? something post-viral?), and this article in The New Yorker not only explains where she has been for the past dozen years (mostly unable to travel or write or even get out of bed some days), but also lists the influences she brought to this work (etchings by the 18th century artist, Giovanni Piranesi, whose work adds meaning to the title; the decrepit city of Charn in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, a book that gave Piranesi one of its two epigraphs and much of its ethos; the sense of unproductive confinement serrendipitously shared by Clarke due to her illness and those of us who are reading this book during a COVID lockdown), and all of this information makes Piranesi seem like an inevitable product of Clarke’s recent experiences and interests. I am certain that in her months and years of isolation, Clarke had a lot of time to think about the meaning of life, the meaning of “progress”, and consider man’s relationship to the universe; big ideas that she was able to thought-provokingly explore in a small book that read like a mysterious adventure tale. It might be kind of niche, but this book suited me to a tee.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

 

It goes by many names: “The Crisis”, “The Dark Years”, “The Walking Plague”, as well as newer and more “hip” titles such as “World War Z” or “Z War One”. I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable “Z War Two”. For me, it will always be “The Zombie War”, and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard-pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book.

World War Z was a book club read for me, and having seen the silly action movie based on it years ago, I didn’t expect this to be much more than a mild diversion. But it is more than that, nothing like the movie, and I was surprised by how much I liked this. The concept: Published ten years after the official end of The Zombie War that nearly wiped out humanity, UN agent Max Brooks — who has travelled the globe, assembling eyewitness reports to the crisis — was given the greenlight to preserve those stories that illustrate “the human factor” of the war that the UN had purged from his official reports. Compiled as a series of interviews, as though directly transcribed from Brooks’ translation/recording device, what I liked the most was the truly global perspective: Each country responded to the zombie threat in its own culturally unique way and exploring these differences seems to be the main focus of the book. On the plus side, it is obvious that Brooks did a lot of research into military-tactical/medical/sociocultural information (the whole reads as plausible), but in the minus column, there’s a sameness to the voices of the people he interviews; even the women sound like men (but perhaps that’s who survives a zombie war, and we are only meeting the survivors). Brooks has written that his inspiration was to reimagine the journalism of Studs Terkel ("The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two) by way of George Romero’s Return of the Living Dead films, and to the extent that he has used this conceit for thought-provoking social commentary, I’d call World War Z a conceptual success and an entertaining read.

Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.

Who could imagine a worldwide health crisis hitting the news cycle and the American government downplaying its danger because it’s an election year? Would the rest of the world take the situation more seriously if Israel retreated from Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories to a completely defensible position, even granting Palestinians a one time right of return before clamping down the Iron Dome? As I opened with, it was these various global responses that I found most fascinating: When the first zombies arise in China, the government denies their existence and disappears all witnesses; South Africa enacts an apartheid-era plan for saving “the valuable minority” against swarming masses; the French take unnecessary risks against the zombie hordes in order to redeem their WWII legacy as cowards; I particularly enjoyed the irony of boatloads of Americans trying to escape to the relative safety of Cuba. From a nuclear sub hiding at the bottom of the ocean to astronauts on the ISS; from Russia to Japan to northern Canada, Brooks imagines a uniquely appropriate response for each situation. There may not be a tense and dramatic story arc to this novel — we open with the knowledge that the zombie threat has been mostly contained and that we’ll only hear survivor stories — but each story is a nugget of drama that tells us something about humanity.

I remember reading years ago that World War Z was written as a metaphor for the battle that Brooks’ mother (actress Anne Bancroft) waged against cancer, and knowing that beforehand, I was often mentally swapping out “cancer” for “zombie” as I read:

For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That’s the kind of enemy that was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That’s the kind of war we had to fight.

And as 2020 comes to a close, I couldn’t help but mentally swap out “COVID-19” for “zombies” as I read, and that also had satisfying parallels:

The numbers are declining, thank heavens, but it doesn’t mean people should let down their guard. We’re still at war, and until every trace is sponged, and purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the Earth, everybody’s still gotta pitch in and do their job. Be nice if that was the lesson people took from all this misery. We’re all in this together, so pitch in and do your job.

This was a good book club pick for right now and I am delighted that I got more out of World War Z than I had expected to.

Added on December 24: We rewatched the movie last night, and while it wasn't quite as "silly" as I remembered it, Dave and I agreed that it was pretty forgettable (all I could really remember from years ago was Brad Pitt in a helicopter, "fast zombies" piling up against the wall surrounding Jerusalem, and people tiptoeing through a lab). I will say that the movie is much more dramatic than the book - it happens in the opening days of the zombie war, after all, when people don't even know what they're fighting against - but the movie loses all semblance of  social commentary, which was the point of the book. Two totally different experiences, and I much preferred the book.

Tyll

 

Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly — not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stood with his right foot lengthwise on the rope, his left crosswise, his knees slightly bent and his fists on his hips. And all of us, looking up, suddenly understood what lightness was. We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.

Tyll is the very best kind of historical fiction: Using a folkloric German character (the fabled prankster imp, Tyll Ulenspiegel) and transplanting him into a very real, very tragic period that includes the Thirty Years War (apparently 60% of the German population died in that 17th century conflict, mostly from starvation and disease), author Daniel Kehlmann is able to paint a vivid picture of a truly horrifying time and place without making those horrors overly explicit; this is mostly stench and chills and the telling of fairy tales to still an empty belly. The average person had very little freedom — lives were controlled by custom, superstition, fear of marauding armies and the witch-hunting Church — but as a wandering entertainer, this version of Tyll Ulenspiegel was beholden to no man, neither priest nor king, and he could speak truth to power with a wink; and that wink is what makes this history lesson so entertaining. The timeline in Tyll is jumbled — chapters jump around major episodes from Tyll’s life, and in several chapters from the points-of-view of actual historic characters, Tyll doesn’t necessarily appear at all — and from the sentences to the structure, this is a serious and well-constructed work of fiction that amused and bemused me beginning to end. I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Suddenly the dance was over. Gasping for breath, we looked up at the wagon, on which Tyll Ulenspeigel was now standing alone; the two women were nowhere to be seen. He sang a mocking ballad about the poor, stupid Winter King, the Elector Palatine, who had thought he could defeat the Kaiser and accept Prague’s crown from the Protestants, yet his kingship had melted away even before the snow. He sang about the Kaiser too, who was always cold from praying, the little man trembling before the Swedes in the imperial palace in Vienna, and then he sang about the King of Sweden, the Lion of Midnight, strong as a bear, but of what use had it been to him against the bullets in Lützen that took his life like that of any mere soldier, and out was your light, and gone the little royal soul, gone the lion! Tyll Ulenspiegel laughed, and we laughed too, because you couldn’t resist him and because it did us good to remember that these great men were dead and we were still alive.

I confess to not knowing anything about the Thirty Years War beforehand, but without lecturing or infodumping, Kehlmann lays out the history of that conflict — how it started, how it played out, how it affected the average person on the ground — in vignettes of how people (commoner or king) lived out their daily lives. In some of my favourite bits, Tyll somehow gets taken on as the official Court Fool for Frederick V and his wife Elizabeth Stuart — briefly the King and Queen of Bohemia, derisively known as the Winter King and Queen for the brevity of their reign — and in this role, Tyll is free to make Falstaffian observations about Their Majesties; fair, since it was the egos of this pair that provoked the war. I especially liked the chapters from Elizabeth’s POV — a royal personage might expect more comforts in life than groats and small beer, but rules of etiquette very much restricted her freedom, too — and I enjoyed her memories of watching the King’s Men perform in London as a girl and meeting with Shakespeare himself; I liked her English disdain (as imagined by a German author) as she dismissed German culture:

In German lands real theatre was unknown; there, pitiful players roamed through the rain and screamed and hopped and farted and brawled. This was probably due to the cumbersome language; it was no language for theatre; it was a brew of groans and harsh grunts, it was a language that sounded like someone struggling not to choke, like a cow having a coughing fit, like a man with beer coming out his nose. What was a poet supposed to do with this language? She had given German literature a try, first that Opitz and then someone else, whose name she had forgotten; she could not commit to memory these people who were always named Krautbacher or Engelkrämer or Kargholzsteingrömpl, and when you had grown up with Chaucer, and John Donne had dedicated verses to you — “fair phoenix bride,” he had called her, “and from thine eye all lesser birds will take their jollity” — then even with the utmost politeness you could not bring yourself to find any merit in all this German bleating.

Tyll himself — as a tight-rope walker, juggler, ventriloquist, actor, and balladeer — is one of these lowbrow “pitiful players”, but German culture is eventually redeemed by a chance meeting with Paul Fleming (a poet who unapologetically wrote his verses in German), and many years later, at a reception during the peace talks at Westphalia that negotiated the end the Thirty Years War, Elizabeth is stunned by a small chamber group (four violinists, one harpist, and a man with a strange horn) that play an oddly compelling music (that I took to presage the eventual dominance by German composers in symphony and opera; “cat pianos” notwithstanding.)

Along the way, we also meet a pair of witch-hunting Jesuits — the actual scholars Oswald Tesimond (lone surviving architect of the Gunpowder Plot that had targeted Elizabeth’s family in England) and Athanasius Kircher (a Da Vinci-like polymath and author of dozens of “major works”) — and as they keep an eye out for dragons (the best proof for the existence of a dragon in any area is the fact that no one has ever claimed to see one there; they are just that crafty), the pair demonstrate the Kafkaesque nature of a witch trial, with zero self-awareness of their own hypocrisies. Just one more oppressive mechanism that the average person has no power to fight back against. And just like we don’t actually see battle, just the war’s effects on the population (the closest we get is the Winter King’s visit to a Swedish army camp, where he is knocked back by the stench and can’t keep his eyes off a particularly horrific sight), we don’t see inside the witch-hunters’ torture chamber, just witness its effects:

She is silent. Her lips don’t move, her eyes seem extinguished. She looks like an empty shell, her face a mask that no one is wearing, her arms as if hung wrong at the joints. Better not to think about it, thinks Dr. Kircher, who at the same moment naturally cannot help thinking about what Master Tilman did to those arms to make them hang so wrong. Better not to imagine it. He rubs his eyes and imagines it.

But no matter how powerless the peasantry, Tyll and his band of motley players is bound to eventually make an appearance in their village square; and even if it’s Tyll’s donkey, Origenes, who gets to say the words that mock powerful men to their faces, everyone will feel a vicarious twinge of strength. The concept of inserting the fictional Tyll into actual historic drama is ultimately a very powerful one and Kehlmann must be applauded for this feat of engineering; I am looking forward to picking up more from the author.