Mind Picking : Farewell 2021 (And once again: Good Riddance!)

 

I gave the above candle to Dave on his birthday at the end of December because it pretty much sums up the year for us (and as Dave noted when he opened it with delight, discovering and binge-watching Schitt's Creek was one of 2021's few highlights). 2021 began with another year of COVID lockdowns — hard on everyone but particularly frustrating for us as we tried to take care of Dave's parents' mounting health crises — and while I was grateful for time off work that let me spend my days with Dave's Dad as he increasingly couldn't take care of himself on his own, nothing about this year felt like a vacation or a reset; 2021, more than anything, feels like a lost year. As noted here before, Dave's Mom passed away in May, his Dad just eight weeks later, and although we had a very small interment ceremony for the pair of them at the beginning of August, Dave feels really bad that restrictions haven't loosened up enough, at the right time, for us to have held a celebration of life with more of their friends and family in attendance. I know that they would understand the delay, but Bev and Jim do deserve so much more than we've been able to provide so far. Here's to getting it right in 2022.

The absolute highlight of the year was Kennedy and Zach's wedding in September up at Sauble Beach (and we will be forever grateful that we were able to get that property back into family hands, and that Dave's parents would be aware of that fact, before they passed away). I was happy for Mallory that she decided to go back to school, and while I miss having her around, I know it's good for her to be independent and live in her new apartment with her friends. The only other real event of note was my thyroid surgery in October, but I've already written all I want to about that for now. No trips this year; no concerts or theatre; not even an extra number of books read despite the lockdown: 2021 was a Schitt show.

This was a year that saw me wanting to burn down everything that had recently been giving my life meaning. The gym was closed for the first half of 2021, and as numbers were tightly controlled when it did reopen, they introduced a prebooking app, with the understanding that if you don't give two hours notice before cancelling a booking, you'd be charged a $15 fee. When my father-in-law passed so quickly one evening at his hospice, I didn't think to cancel my gym booking for the next morning — and when I woke too exhausted to attend and only gave one hour notice, I was disgusted to have then been charged the $15 (which is not much money but underlined the fact to me that they are a business and not the "family" that the coaches are encouraged to present themselves as; that's a pretty petty money grab when the 6:45 a.m. class is never even half full.) Only my sister-in-law's desire to keep going every morning stopped me from rage-quitting.

I was also getting tired of the Zoom meetings for book club — this year did not feel like it was providing the same degree of interpersonal connection, and when only two others bothered to read my pick for October (The Only Good Indians — an Indigenous Horror that I thought would be perfect for Halloween and for helping us as Canadians on our path to Truth and Reconciliation), I was truly offended. I haven't attended another meeting since, which I don't even know if anyone has noticed, and I don't know if I'll go back.

And I was also pretty annoyed at work (despite the managers having been very understanding throughout the year about the time off I needed for end-of-life care, the wedding, and the surgery) when I felt like I was overscheduled in December; too many closing shifts, too many days in a row without time off. My old manager retired in October, and it might be a matter of the new manager needing to better learn the scheduling system, but there was a definite air of disgruntlement throughout the store in the lead-up to Christmas. And when my schedule had me working eight days in a row, I could have rage-quit the second I saw it. But then I recognised the pressure that the managers themselves were under, and while I wasn't going to actually come out and complain about it, one joke said in the presence of a manager ("Stop asking if I'm back in tomorrow — I'm in for eight days in a row, which isn't 'technically illegal', so I'll be here") was enough for her to ask me if I wanted the 22nd or the 23rd off as she would be happy to cover me. I was a bit chastened by the offer, tried to refuse it, but she insisted as it was the "right thing to do" and I gratefully took the 23rd (which actually gave me three days off in a row at Christmas, changing me from the worst schedule in the store to the best; I am certain there are resentments pointed at me about this; everyone is exhausted right now). Even my own manager apologised to me for the rotten schedule, thanked me for my understanding, and looked like she was about to cry as she opened her arms to give me a hug. How could I rage-quit that? Ultimately, it's the connections that I've made with my co-workers — and the opportunities that the job has given me to display competence — that keeps me coming back; I have no reason to quit if I'm still feeling fulfilled in these ways.

Like I said above, I read a relatively low number of books in 2021, and that can be tied to this year's lockdowns and losses: When Mallory and I were here together for months, I didn't want to be constantly ignoring her for books. And when I was needed to sit with my father-in-law throughout the day as he declined, I wasn't going to bring a book with me and not act like I was just there for a visit. Dave and I spent most of May and all of September up at Sauble Beach, but we were busy with projects throughout our days and I couldn't ignore him for books when we were done our work. Even the last book I read this year (The Dawn of Everything) took nearly a month to get through because I was so exhausted from work (which, I want to note, hadn't been the case through "Christmas in retail" in earlier years), so this, overall, felt like a year without reading (but 107 books read for the year is hardly nothing.)

So, as in previous years, I present my top reads in no particular order.

Top Ten New Fiction (some are ARCS which aren't yet released, but read in 2021)

The Strangers

I loved revisiting these characters from The Break, and I also appreciated how Vermette seamlessly wove in the realities of COVID protocols as they relate to the fostercare and penal systems. Much of this deeply affected my heart and mind.

Burntcoat

I loved the writing in this: I do believe this will be read years from now by people wanting to understand what living through COVID was like (even if this is just metaphorical and quite a bit steamier than my usual reads).

When We Lost Our Heads

With Heather O'Neill, it's all about delightful language and I loved every word of this.

Sea of Tranquility

Another novel written under COVID lockdown which perfectly captures the essence of the experience; my favourite Emily St John Mandel work to date.

Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy

This is the book that I keep telling everyone was my favourite read of 2021: the language and the ideas totally captivated and provoked me.

The Mystery of Right and Wrong

As a longtime fan of Wayne Johnston's, what this novel reveals of the author's own reality was absolutely mind-blowing to me.

August Into Winter

This novel contains everything I love about Guy Vanderhaeghe: a thrilling plot with beautiful writing.

All's Well

I do love anything related to Shakespeare and the mounting of his plays, but more than that, this felt like raw and relatable feminist fiction

What Strange Paradise

A worthy winner of the Giller Prize, this is such a perfect examination of the refugee experience that I can't stop thinking about it.

Tomnorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This is another book that keeps coming back to me; quirky and different with fantastic characters, I loved every bit of this.

Top Five-ish Nonfiction Books Read in 2021

The Infinite Staircase

My top paradigm-challenging read.

Vagina Obscura and The Menopause Manifesto are a natural pairing (as they both advocate for women having the information they need to make informed health decisions) but both also deserve to stand on their own as fascinating and important reads.

I Had a Brother Once and Vulnerability is My Superpower are a less natural pairing, but as interestingly-formatted memoirs (a prose poem and a comic collection) they each deeply affected me in unique ways.

Around the World in 80 Books

I do love books about books and writing (and so to this one I will add two honourable mentions: The Meaning of Myth and the wonderful Elena Ferrante's In the Margins)

Why Fish Don't Exist

I also love books about animals and this one was one of those fascinating memoirs dressed up as a scientific investigation that can be great when they're done well (I also enjoyed the literary/animal mashup of Aesop's Animals: The Science Behind the Fables and feel compelled to add two dishonourable mentions, from which I had expected so much more: Susan Orlean's On Animals and Mary Roach's Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.)

And although I didn't get around to much classic fiction this year, I did really enjoy Moby Dick (and especially as I read it soon after the wonderful Fathoms: The World in the Whale), I was fascinated by the art project around The Old Woman and the Sea, I was only mostly satisfied by Walden: Life in the Woods (but am certainly enlarged by having finally gotten around to it), and although Agnes Grey might have been my least favourite Brontë novel so far, it certainly wasn't a waste of my time. Here's to many more classic reads in the years to come!

I feel like I usually have more to say than this — and with oversized losses and the happiest of gains this year (I do so love having a son-in-law), this feels like a year about which I should have so much to say — but 2021 was definitely a Schitt show and I'm done with it, ready to look forward to the future. Here's to embracing all the things that work for me and blowing up those that don't!

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

With the grandiose subtitle of “A New History of Humanity”, I was certainly expecting a lot from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything; and in retrospect, I may have been expecting too much, and too much of something different altogether. I love reading stories of how people live in different places and different times — and those stories are here — but mostly, this reads like a one-sided argument that I don’t know anything about and that I didn’t know was taking place. The bottom line: Graeber and Wengrow argue that there’s nothing inevitable about the progression of human civilisation to the point where we find ourselves today; and that modern academia is an echochamber for that theory of progress, dismissing and suppressing evidence to the contrary. I didn’t realise until afterwards that Graeber, who has since passed, was a noted anarchist activist and one of the founders of the Occupy Movement, so while I understand why this book is antiestablishment, I was nevertheless disappointed that it didn’t offer up any ideas for how we could be doing things better. Overall, this was an often fascinating and paradigm-challenging read, but it didn’t amount to much, and some quirky writing (which only served to lengthen a long book) force me to round down to three stars. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would otherwise be invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say that things are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévis-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Post-Enlightenment, we have been taught to think of early humans as living in one of two opposing states: that described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a state of peaceful harmony with nature until the first person claimed a plot of land as their own; ushering in inequality, onerous bureaucracy, and state-sponsored violence) and that of Thomas Hobbes (who described life as “nasty, brutish, and short” until state control was introduced to stem interpersonal violence). Following in this vein, modern pop history writers — the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari; all smugly dismissed by Graeber and Wengrow — take it for granted that the rise of human civilsation was an inevitable progression from unself-examined hunter-gatherer societies to early agriculture, the formation of cities, through to a culmination in modern democracy and capitalism. In particular, the authors chastise Harari (who once wrote that early humans were either as aggressive as chimpanzees or as peaceful as bonobos) as denying humanity to these early humans (literally comparing them to animals until they first started cultivating grain), and I must admit that that is a valid criticism: why can’t we think of early humans as actual people who made conscious choices about the kind of society in which they wanted to live? By telling the stories of many types of societies across time and space — including those that experimented with agriculture, monarchy, and city-states before abandoning them as untenable — the authors prove that there really isn’t anything inevitable about where we find ourselves today. I liked learning the stories of those who experimented with agriculture before giving it up (including the folks who built Stonehenge, who had reverted to acorn-harvesting at the time of their big project) and I appreciated that the authors took issue with historians who use terms like “intermediary period” or “proto-something” to describe times when early humans weren’t engaging in those activities we think of as markers of civilisation (as though people were living in stable societies for generations, just waiting for something important to happen). My thinking was challenged about these early societies — especially as it was mostly formed by the pop history writers that Graeber and Wengrow dismiss — and I like being challenged.

Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies — say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction — will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternate possibilities: roads not taken?

Again, I appreciate the scholarship on display in The Dawn of Everything — and especially as it describes those people who simply walked away from the bureaucracies and overlords who made their lives unpleasant, leading to the ruins of former cities that now dot the globe — but while it is provocative to think of modern Western civilisation as an entirely replaceable construct (and I can’t deny that it doesn’t work for everyone), it feels naive for the authors to imply that it can all be torn down without offering an idea of what would come next. Honestly, as interesting as the history was, I kept waiting for the point; it’s not like today we could just walk away from our cities and countries and find empty space in which to mindfully start over; understanding history in this case does not feel, in itself, like a road map to a better future. I still enjoyed the read.

Fifty Words for Snow

 

There is much poignant art and literature about polar purity and silence, but the longer I spent among the snow, the more I suspected such tropes are born of luxury and distance. It is a view that overwrites the peopled landscape, ignores the tracks of sleds and snowmobiles that cross it, the busy burrows and root systems beneath it. As time passed and I looked more closely, I realised snow does not always appear white. As I listened more carefully, I realised that snow was not silent. I spoke to those who worked with snow, from Inuit hunters to Scottish hill farmers, and noticed that their traditional knowledge was often enshrined in highly differentiated vocabularies. Fifty Words for Snow is a journey to discover snow in cultures around the world through different languages.

I don’t know what I thought I would get from Fifty Words for Snow — its description made me think that it would have something to do with how culture shapes language and how language then reflects culture in return; and further, how declining rates of snow will contribute to losses of culture and language — and as a resident of Canada, I thought there would be something for me to identify with here. But for the most part, there wasn’t much. Author Nancy Campbell — a poet and essayist — has lived and worked in Arctic landscapes, and with an interest in how climate change is impacting those landscapes (and the people still trying to eke out a traditional life within them) and with a partner whose stroke-induced aphasia has made her more attuned to “the complexity of language loss”, I was somehow set up to expect more from this. What there is: Literally, fifty words for snow from languages around the world, followed by an essay (from a paragraph to many pages) that gives some context for how the word is used (whether in everyday use, mythology/literature, or the sciences) , each accompanied by a gorgeous photo of a snowflake by Wilson Bentley (1865-1931, the first known person to take detailed photographs of snowflakes and record their features). What is missing: A through theme or analysis or overarching conclusion; this is more coffee table book than narrative nonfiction (and to be fair, I wasn’t promised more than a coffee table book). (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Pana snow knife (Inuktitut: ᐸᓇ) / Sparrow batch spring snow (Newfoundland English)

To begin my thoughts close to home, it was annoying to me that Campbell referred to Canada’s largest and most northern territory as “the state of Nunavut”, adding “Nunavut is also the newest state”. (We have provinces and territories in Canada — there are no geographical or political areas or communities we would refer to as “states” — and even googling the word for its generic definition doesn’t satisfactorily describe Nunavut.) Later, Campbell writes that the residents of Newfoundland refer to their island dialect as “Newfinese”, and that’s a word I’ve never heard used before. All of this to say: If I don’t recognise Canada (definitely a snowy country) in the two mentions made of it in a book on snow, I don’t know how far I can trust the author to tell me about other snow-bound cultures. Many of the words that Campbell has chosen are sourced from polar countries, but she seems to have found more delight in sharing words from cultures we don’t necessarily equate with snow: from Hawaiian (Hau kea, white snow; “most likely to be found on a simmering crater”), to Thai (H̄ima, snow; useful to describe the one time it allegedly snowed in Thailand in recorded history, in 1955), and Amharic (Barado, snow or hail, used in the debate among early European explorers over the presence of snow in the Ethiopian mountains). When it comes to the literary, it was more meaningful to me to learn about the word Snemand (snowman, Danish) and how it was used in a famous story by Hans Christian Andersen than the chapter on Calóg shneachta (snowflake, Irish) that then goes on to recount James Joyce’s “The Dead” and a conversation about snow that happens at a party (what Campbell cites as “one of the most famous mentions of snow in literature.”) The shortest chapter reads, in its entirety:

Cheotnun first snow (Korean: 첫눈) The word for snow in Korean, nun, is the same word as is used for ‘eye’. And so if you experience the first snowfall of the year – cheotnun – with someone you have eyes for, it is said that true love will drift into your arms.

I don’t know if I find that as complete an entry as the Inuit process of building an iglu, and it’s this feeling of unevenness that makes this collection feel themeless. But there were many interesting tidbits I learned along the way:

• Immiaq melted ice or snow; beer (Greenlandic) The great glacier Sermeq Kujalleq...calves around 46 km3 of ice every year – an amount that would cover the annual water consumption of the USA.

• Seaŋáš granulated snow (Sámi of Norway) while there are around one hundred Sámi terms for snow, the words relating to reindeer are estimated at over a thousand.

• Jäätee ice road (Estonian) Drivers must keep to speeds of between 25 km/ h and 40 km/ h – the lower limit is important. No stopping is allowed. This is a precaution against changes to the car’s rate of progress causing a wave under the ice; if such a wave accumulates it can be strong enough to crack it. For the same reason vehicles must travel at least two minutes apart, and so drivers wait at the shore for a green light before they set out. These strict safety measures are accompanied by an unexpected road rule: it’s forbidden to wear seatbelts, because drivers and passengers might have to exit the car speedily in the event of the ice cracking.

And I did connect with the mythological — and only wish there was more of this — as with Yuki-onna snow woman (Japanese: 雪女):

Are all human encounters with the elements so ill-fated? Is it possible to keep our most profound dealings with nature a secret? Will the snows stay forever, or will winter turn to spring? Whether the yuki-onna is a malevolent ghost stealing lonely lives in the wilderness or a supernatural beauty living in disguise among humans, she affirms the transformative qualities of snow.

(I also didn’t know that Japan has the deepest snowfalls in the world — 40m/year in the Japanese Alps — and that there is a highway known as the Snow Corridor that travels between 20m high snow walls; I would love to see that.) So: I would have liked more of this — more writing about actually snowy countries and how that snow influences their lives and their mythologies, with a touch of authorial analysis thrown in — but again, I wasn’t actually promised that and another reader might be completely pleased with what is to be found here. Middle of the road three stars for me.

This Is Happiness

 

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

I love me an Irish storyteller, and having previously loved Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, I thought that This is Happiness would be a slam dunk — but it was more of a shot that circles the rim forever before falling off; edge of your seat in the moment without ultimate satisfaction. And it’s hard to put my finger on why this took me so long to read — I kept falling asleep after a couple of chapters and was never excited to pick it up again — but still, it has really fine and interesting writing, engaging characters, and thoughtfulness behind the plot; it just failed to score with me. Rounding down to three stars out of sheer exhaustion.

When you saw someone in the river your first thought was not swimming, it was drowning. In a lifetime there’s more than one doorway. Even as I was running I think I knew this was one. It’s not so easy to run across a field in springtime, and in my memory a field like Ganga’s, pock and lump, dung and rushes and slick April grass, was treachery. And because an old man has only the story of his own life I am running across it still, a lanky seventeen-year-old from Dublin, shy and obdurate both, running with a premonition that I thought was doom but was maybe fate if you’re a party to that. I was running believing I was going to save him, when of course it was he who would save me.

As it opens, This is Happiness sees seventeen-year-old Noel “Noe” Crowe leaving the seminary with a crisis of faith, and when he elects to spend some time with his rural paternal grandparents (whom he calls Ganga and Doadie), Noe couldn’t have known that this would be at a time of profound local change; changes that would affect his own life’s path. Noe is telling this story from the vantage of old age — he states that these events happened over six decades earlier, so somewhere in the 1950’s — and we get the benefit of both hearing the well-worn stories that made such an impact on a once naive youth and the meaning that was made of the events over the course of sixty years. The major events: A long string of hot and sunny days in this famously drenched corner of Ireland spurs wonder and impatience; electricity is finally run to the village of Faha and its surrounds; Noe suffers an injury and falls hard for the doctor’s daughters; Noe’s grandparents provide lodging for one of the electricity workers, and this Christy is a larger-than-life character who will demonstrate for Noe a deeper way of feeling and living:

”O ho now!” I shouted, both of us happy as heathens beneath the warm breath of night sky and pedalling now in the boy hectic of blind momentum and nocturnal velocity so we missed the turn at Crossan’s went straight and straight on and straight in through Crossan’s open gate and across the wild bump-bump-bump and sudden su-su-su suck of their bog meadow where my front wheel sank in a rushy rut and I and a cry and a jet of brown vomit were projected out over the handlebars and flew glorious for one long and sublime instant before landing face-first in the cold puddle and muck of reality.

Noe is a believable and sympathetic character, tottering over the brink of adulthood; Ganga and Doadie are colourful and authentic and everything you’d want your grandparents to be; and Christy brings the hijinx and the heartache, and as he and Noe go pub-crawling throughout the county in search of a (locally) legendary fiddle player, Christie is capable of unironically throwing his head back, and with eyes closed and fists clenched, serenading the air with timeless songs of love and loss:

Christy sang. I cannot tell you how startling it was. If you believe in a soul, as I do, then my soul stirred. The song was not composed by Christy, but by the alchemy of performance, you felt it was. It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.

And maybe that’s the crux of it — a dangerous line for any novelist to provide for a reader — as much as I did like moments in this book, I don’t leave it feeling illuminated. To return to my b-ball analogy: This was like a long game of pickup with a good sweat and some nice plays, but no one’s keeping score, and nothing about it makes this outing on the court feel more exceptional than the hundreds of other times I’ve been there. Worthwhile, but not remarkable.

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

 

I believe that the sense I have of writing — and all the struggles it involves — has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success.

In an opening Editor’s Note, it is explained that Elena Ferrante had been invited to give a series of three lectures on writing, open to the public, at the University of Bologna. Pandemic-related restrictions ultimately prevented her from giving the lectures in person, but an actress delivered them in her stead and those lectures (plus a fourth essay written for a conference on Dante and Other Classics) are compiled here in In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. I do find it fascinating to learn of writers’ processes — and especially when I’ve read widely and pleasurably of an author — and Ferrante took this assignment seriously; the result is scholarly, thoughtful, and eye-opening. No wonder I find Ferrante’s fiction so engaging: it is a reflection of her lifetime of close reading, deep thinking, and hard won craftsmanship. Probably most suited for fans of her novels, this certainly worked for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The lectures:

Pain and Pen

A sort of vicious circle established itself clearly in my mind: if I wanted to believe that I was a good writer, I had to write like a man, staying strictly within the male tradition; although a woman, I couldn’t write like a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition.

Ferrante was a literary child — a constant reader and praised writer of small fictions — and she was precocious enough to recognise early in life that there are rules to fiction; structures that both support and limit a writer (like the ruled lines and margins in a school notebook). In this lecture, Ferrante describes the conflict these rules created for her budding voice and she shares some of the writings that encouraged and influenced her: Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (“My thinking seems something separate from me”), Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary (“I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie”), Gaspara Stampa’s poem Rime (from the POV of “a lowly, abject woman”) and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (“I’m in words, made of words”).

Aquamarine

I thought: everything that randomly kindles the start of a story is there outside and hits us, we collide, it confuses us, gets confused. Inside — inside us — is only the fragile machinery of our body. What we call “inner life” is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing. So I looked around, waiting, for me at the time writing had, essentially, eyes: the trembling of a yellow leaf, the shiny parts of the coffee maker, my mother’s ring with the aquamarine that gave off a sky-blue light, my sisters fighting in the courtyard, the enormous ears of the bald man in the blue smock. I wanted to be a mirror. I assembled fragments according to a before and an after, I set one inside the other, a story came out. It happened naturally, and I did it constantly.

A teacher once quoted from Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master as a piece of advice for the young Ferrante: Tell the thing as it is. This was advice that the young writer found paralyzing — understanding that she can only describe things as they are filtered through her own consciousness — and ultimately, Ferrante says of the main characters in her first three novels (Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, and The Lost Daughter), “I am, I would say, their autobiography as they are mine.” Ferrante then notes some readings that showed her new ways of looking at fiction (Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) and these were the springboard to a new narrative voice (examining characters through “a necessary other”) that she would go on to use in My Brilliant Friend.

Histories, I

A woman who wants to write has unavoidably to deal not only with the entire literary patrimony she’s been brought up on and in virtue of which she wants to and can express herself but with the fact that that patrimony is essentially male and by its nature doesn’t provide true female sentences.

Quoting from poets Emily Dickinson (“Witchcraft was hung, in History”), María Guerra (“I lost a poem”), and Ingeborg Bachmann (“We have to work hard with the bad language that we have inherited”), Ferrante makes the case that if the words we write are influenced by everything we’ve ever read (those words that set the margins of what is acceptable and possible), then women writers have the disadvantage of having not seen enough of their own language in print. Ferrante struggled with finding her own female voice — went back and forth between writing in dialect and formal Italian for her Neapolitan Novels, looking for that voice — and ultimately found it in the interplay between the characters Lila and Lenù; between what they write about each other, as women.

Dante’s Rib

If I had to name what really struck me as a teen-ager — and not so much as a student but as a fledgling reader and aspiring writer — I would start with the discovery that Dante describes the act of writing obsessively, literally and figuratively, constantly presenting its power and its inadequacy, and the provisional nature.

Although there are a couple of references to modern writers who have critiqued Dante’s Commedia, this lecture is essentially about Ferrante’s love of Dante’s writing, and especially his treatment of Beatrice over the course of the epic. Beatrice goes from a mute paragon of girlish beauty to “a woman who has an understanding of God and speculative language, modeling her — I like to think — in the likeness of such figures as Mechtild of Magdeburg, Hildegarde of Bingen, Juliana of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, and Angela da Foligna, magistra theologorum. He does it naturally by bestowing on a female figure scientific, theological, mystical knowledge that is his, that he gets from his studies, from his rib. But in doing this — in that inleiarsi, so to speak, entering into, becoming her —he ventures to imagine, with his mystic-leaning rationalism, with his visionary realism, what is possible for women.” And so, it would seem, there are feminine role models in the patrimony (even if they were written by men) if one knows where to look for them.

Overall, I think these lectures would have had more impact in person — they read like speeches more than essays — but I was fascinated to learn how deeply Ferrante has struggled to find and shape her voice. I’m definitely pleased to have added this collection to what makes up my own sensibilities.

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

 

One of the questions I found myself asking scientists most often as I reported on this book was: why has it taken until now for science to investigate [insert obvious thing]? For example: What makes a healthy vaginal ecosystem? How does the menstrual cycle actually work? What is the G-spot, really? . . . and the list goes on. In response, I always heard some version of the phrase: You can’t see what you aren’t looking for. Or: you see what you expect to see. In many ways, this book is about different ways of looking.

Vagina Obscura is a fascinating look at the history, science, and politics of female sexual and reproductive anatomy (as the terms may be used to describe a variety of cis-gendered, trans-gendered, and non-binary bodies), tracing what we have learned about these body parts from the time of Hippocrates (who called them “the shame parts”), through Darwin and Freud (who both dismissed the “passive” vagina as less important to reproduction than the “dynamic” penis), to modern researchers (whose work was most surprising to me by virtue of its very recentness). This is a highly readable book — author Rachel E. Gross writes about the maddeningly long history of the dismissal of female intimate health concerns without anger or stridency (or any of the other words used to dismiss women’s writing about “women’s issues”) — and whether or not one is looking to learn something about the science of female anatomy, the research, interviews, and history all make for a captivating reading experience. I learned much and thoroughly enjoyed the writing; I can’t ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There are parts of your own body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of Mars. Most researchers I talked to blamed this dearth of knowledge on the black-box problem: the female body is more complex, more obscure, with much of its plumbing tucked up inside. To get inside it, we’ve needed high-tech imaging tools, tools that have only come around in the past decade or so. When I heard these answers, I couldn’t help thinking of what science has done in the twenty-first century: put a rover on Mars, made a three-parent baby, built an artificial uterus. And we couldn’t figure out the composition of vaginal mucus?

I can’t go over everything I learned in Vagina Obscura, but I will note that women’s anatomy doesn’t seem to have become a priority to scientists until women themselves became scientists: From Princess Marie Bonaparte (a relative of Napoleon and an acolyte of Freud, she did important early research on the clitoris [in conflict with Freud’s theories on female psychosexual development]) to Linda Griffith (one of the genetic engineers behind the “earmouse”, she never wanted to be stuck in the “pink ghetto” of women’s health research until her own breast cancer scare prompted her to use her MacArthur “genius” grant to investigate endometriosis) and Dr. Marci Bowers (a transwoman who is currently one of the leading gender affirmation surgeons in the US), women lead the field in moving thie science forward. I was fascinated by the reconstructive work that is done for both transwomen and those who have been affected by FGM; I was interested to learn that endometriosis is pretty much the new “hysteria” (often dismissed as “all in a woman’s head” — and curable with pregnancy! — unless one is a woman of colour who can be branded a “drug-seeker” for showing up at an emergency room monthly with crippling pain); and I was stunned to consider that it used to be “normal” for a woman to have about forty periods in her lifetime (between pregnancies and nursing) compared to four hundred today. After a section on the long list of systems that ovulation supports throughout the female body, Gross writes about the researchers currently looking for a way to prevent menopause (in an effort to fend off the ensuing risk of heart disease, diabetes, dementia, etc.), but also asks if this is something women would actually sign on for. Dr. Jen Gunter (author of The Menopause Manifesto) is quoted as saying about this research, “If you’re looking at restoring ovarian function for women who are fifty-one, what’s the endgame? What’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve? And if you tell me the problem is menopause, I’m going to tell you you’re a misogynist.” And to those who would ask what’s so important about studying female anatomy, Gross would reply:

Our bodies can blind us. But they can also free us to see differently. They can help us bear witness to how a multitude of people, bodies, and perspectives have fallen through the cracks. Only by seeing connections instead of siloes, sameness instead of difference, and the universal inside the particular can we move the science of the female body forward and point the way to a truer, fuller understanding of all bodies.

From ducks with corkscrew-shaped penises (and the female ducks whose corkscrew-shaped vaginas twist in the opposite direction to prevent unwanted insemination from frequent duck rape) to a description of the human egg releasing granules of calcium to harden its “zona” after a sperm breaches it (leading to the sentence: On the fifth day following conception, the embryo hatches from its shell and implants into the tissues of the uterus. How had I never heard of this before??), Vagina Obscura contains a wealth of fascinating facts that support thought-provoking commentary on history and science and the history of science. Compelling, beginning to end.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

Maybe I should start by saying that I am definitely not a gamer — we’ve had several systems and countless games in the house over the years and the closest I’ve come to participating is singing along with The Beatles: Rock Band — but I found this book to be intensely interesting. With Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — about two childhood friends who have a falling out, but when they run into each other as college students, go on to create some of the most popular video games in the world — author Gabrielle Zevin takes a subject that I’m not that familiar with and makes it relatable, universal, and meaningful. Covering topics like sickness and disability, grief, poverty, abusive relationships, and evolving political landscapes, Zevin makes the case for people finding ways to live meaningful lives within invented worlds that are closed to them in reality, and not incidental to my enjoyment, she creates invented worlds that I found fascinating and artful. She has also created some truly compelling characters here, and when they hurt, I hurt; I cried more than once while reading this, and I love anything that touches this jaded heart. Four solid stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said . “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

Sam and Sadie met in a children’s hospital in Los Angeles in the late 80s; a time when Super Mario was the newest game and your grandfather having a Donkey Kong arcade machine in his pizzeria was the height of cool to a fellow game nerd. Both kids were incredibly smart and driven, and although their intense friendship was initially short-lived, it wasn’t a total surprise that they would both end up going to college in Boston — with Sam studying Mathematics at Harvard and Sadie doing Computer Programming at MIT. The two bump into each other, Sadie gives Sam a cd-rom from her Game Design Seminar, and when he plays her game, Sam recognises the genius of Sadie’s creativity: he knows they must spend the summer break designing a game together. And the rest is gaming history: that first project, Ichigo, would go on to be the best-selling game of the year, launching a franchise and their company, Unfair Games. The writing style feels very sophisticated, with Zevin organically invoking the past, present, and future; sometimes in the same paragraph:

What was particularly amazing to Sam — and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie — was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.” In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the “white cousin.” In New York, he was that “little Chinese kid.” And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.

I appreciated the frequent, and seemingly incidental, references to interviews and panels that the partners would eventually participate in — from the very first page, the reader knows that this novel will be about people who made it big — but I also loved how frank Zevin was about the insane combination of talent, hard work, connections, and luck that it took for Sadie and Sam to develop and launch their game; how draining the forming and running of a company would be on their friendship and creativity (Zevin could have been talking about being a novelist or a singer or an artist of any type). And again, it was the characters themselves — these striving artists — who made the story for me; the following touching me deeply:

“I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

I do need to note the novel’s most significant drawback: some unnecessarily obscure vocabulary choices. Maybe gamers can be forgiven for thinking in words like “echt”, “ludic”, and even “grok”, but a passage like the following just comes off as precious (and is the reason I rounded down to four stars instead of up to five):

Zoe was sitting in the living room, cross-legged on a large ikat silk pillow and playing the pan flute, which she was currently learning. Her Titian hair fell past her breasts and her only habiliments were her white cotton underwear.

On the other hand, I can’t stress enough how much I loved the artistic descriptions of the games that were developed (and the collaborative process behind their creation); I loved the philosophical bits about how role-playing in video games (as well as acting on stage or even drawing and solving mazes or seeing the hidden image in a Magic Eye image) unleashes the unconscious mind into the world; I weirdly loved how unglamourous Zevin makes LA sound; and most of all, I loved Sadie and Sam and this story of a remarkable relationship. So much to love here.

Sea of Tranquility

 

The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.

Sea of Tranquility is my favourite Emily St. John Mandel so far: more playful than her previous novels, I found this to be meaningful and thought-provoking while absolutely capturing the experience of living through the Covid-19 pandemic. Some characters from The Glass Hotel make a return and, metafictionally, Station Eleven is referenced (as a stand-in for Mandel herself is asked what it’s like to see her pandemic novel, Marienbad, resurge in popularity during an actual pandemic), and the whole feels like a David Mitchellesque über-project; Mandel is on her way to creating an epic here. On its own, this volume might feel a bit slight (it only takes a few hours to read), but for what it adds to the overall project, and for what it captures of our times, I am rounding up to five stars; it’s a perfect little gem. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The following might be slightly spoilery as I attempt to note enough detail for my own future use (but not more spoilery than the publisher’s blurb).

He steps forward — into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound — When he returns to his senses he’s on the beach, kneeling on hard stones, vomiting.

The novel begins in 1912 and eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John St. Andrew is exiled to Canada after, mystifyingly, voicing some audacious opinions at his parents’ dinner party (Including: evidence suggests the people of India feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat; and: the family’s remote forefather William the Conqueror had been naught but “the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider”), and after hopscotching ever-westward through Halifax, Saskatchewan, Victoria, and finally landing in a small community further up the coast of Vancouver Island, Edwin has an out-of-body-to-blackout experience in the forest that leaves him spooked and shaken. An oddly-accented man posing as a priest wants to question Edwin, but the stranger runs away when the real priest turns up.

The next chapter jumps ahead to the year 2020 and a composer is showing an audience the strange video that his sister (Vincent Alkaitis from The Glass Hotel) once took of a forest clearing near her hometown on Vancouver Island; the same clearing that Edwin had entered, the video cutting to black after the same out-of-time violins-and-hydraulics sound experience that Edwin had encountered. In the audience that night and wanting to speak with the composer, Paul, are: a fawning fanboy in oversized clothing, Mirella — an old friend of Vincent’s, hoping to track her down — and a man with a strange accent who, incredibly, may have crossed paths with Mirella when she was a child. But why hasn’t he aged since then?

We knew it was coming. We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children — and ourselves — in the decades that followed. We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways — “Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness — Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us.

Jump ahead to 2203 and author Olive Llewellyn is visiting Earth from her moon-based colony on a book tour for the earliest of her three novels — receiving renewed interest in light of its imminent film adaptation — and as she fields the same boring and sexist questions worldwide, all while missing her husband and daughter back home, she is aware of the mounting irony of promoting a pandemic novel (about a “scientifically implausible flu”) while the news warns of a mysterious new virus. And who is the interviewer with the odd accent who wants to know about that one strange scene in her novel — a vision of trees accompanied by the strain of violins and launching airships — set in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal?

No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.

The next chapter is set in 2401, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts (named for a character in his mother’s favourite book, Marienbad) is a listless thirty-something, drifting through life in a moon colony after the breakup of his marriage and the recent death of his mother. When his sister — a brilliant scientist who works for the secretive Time Institute — shows him an old video that she finds disturbing (the same video of the trees overlaid with violins and airships that Vincent had recorded as a teenager), Gaspery is intrigued to distraction. What he and his sister can’t quite work out from their vantage in the high-tech future is: Has this video captured a glitch in simulated reality? Is it an anomaly created by a paradox-causing time traveller? Is it a supernatural event meant to warn of the End of Days? What if time travel is real and Gaspery can train to go back in time and interview the key players related to the video? Better work on that accent; it’s bad enough that Gaspery hasn’t been taught cursive or Shakespeare.

HR is bureaucracy. As is the Time Institute. The premier research university on the moon, possessor of the only working time machine in existence, intimately enmeshed in government and in law enforcement. Even one of those things would imply a formidable bureaucracy, don’t you think? What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self- protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.

There’s so much in here about the nature of reality — even Mirella works at a tile store that specialises in simulated stone that’s indistinguishable from the real thing; I think it's implied that this same simulated stone is eventually used to build the moon colonies — and those domed colonies, with their projected Earth skies and artificial weather systems, are meant to simulate life on Earth. If we are living in the Matrix, as some of the characters muse, and we believe the simulation, then the simulation is reality. But all worlds — civilisations, planets, computer-generated simulations — eventually run down to their natural ends; even Edwin grows sympathetic to his mother’s grief over the ending of the Raj system in India which she had grown up under. So can the Time Institute be blamed for being ruthless in its aim to protect the timeline from glitches? This is the question at the heart of the plot.

As a stand-in for Mandel, I loved the character of Olive Llewellyn as she patiently fields questions on her book tour (Did that woman just say it was kind of Olive’s husband to care for their child while she was on tour? Is this what Mandel faced on her last book tour as Covid began?) I appreciated Olive’s answer about why people like dystopian fiction:

I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

And I loved that through Olive, Mandel was able to explain why the book she wrote during the pandemic lockdown was a departure into sci-fi:

“I don’t mean to be melodramatic, and I know it’s like this in a lot of places now, but there’s just, there is so much death. There’s death all around us. I don’t want to write about anything real.” The journalist was quiet. “And I know it’s like this for everyone else too. I know how fortunate I am. I know how much worse it could be. I’m not complaining. But my parents live on Earth, and I don’t know if . . .” She had to stop and take a breath to compose herself. “I don’t know when I’ll see them again.”

Mandel was in this uniquely ironic position of having her pandemic-themed novel surge in popularity during a pandemic (Olive drily notes that she doesn’t bring her royalty reports to meetings when an interviewer wants to know specifics about sales numbers), and this book that she wrote during the lockdown not only describes what that experience was like for her as a writer (Olive hoards supplies, feels restless and confined, and needs to juggle home-schooling and work like so many other parents) but she also smoothly interprets and inserts this experience into her larger project. This isn’t reportage, this is art; and I loved it.