Moby-Dick or, the Whale

 

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

I don’t think the world needs my amateur analysis of Moby Dick, so I’ll just use this space to record the fact that I don’t know why it took me so long to read this classic; Moby Dick turned out to be funnier, less dry, and more entertaining than I had imagined. Using a wide variety of tones (ironic, philosophical, swashbuckling), a variety of formats (straight storytelling, scientific interludes, theatrical dialogue with asides and stage directions), Herman Melville threw everything he knew about whales, whaling, and writing into this behemoth and the result (although a flop in its day) endures as a true classic of American Literature. Let this paragraph stand as my “review”; the remainder are the bits I've collected for myself.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Everyone knows that opening line: “Call me Ishmael” feels almost Biblical in its gravity, so I was immediately amused by the paragraph that follows those weighty words; who knew that Ishmael (if that is his real name…) would go to sea every time a fit came over him that made him want to step out in traffic or knock off strangers’ hats? The scenes that follow, leading up to Ishmael meeting the curiously tattooed Queequog, were by turns engagingly lyrical (poor Lazarus stranded on the curbstone before the door of the rich man Dives, “who only drinks the tepid tears of orphans”) and weirdly slapstick (Peter Coffin grinningly planing down a bench for Ishmael to sleep on). The shifting tone had me constantly backfooted, and I liked that. When Ishmael and Queequog eventually share a bed (apparently not uncommon at the time) and Ishmael wakes up in Queequog’s warm embrace (surely more uncommon?), I was hooked (harpooned?). From their initial meeting, I was intrigued by Melville’s (or Ishmael’s, at any rate) apparently nonracist attitudes, and was floored by, “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself — the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” And when the pair travel together to Nantucket to find a whaling ship to sign on with, I was further intrigued by, “For some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.” But eventually, this book does display the prejudices of its time, as when Melville tries to explain why people are inherently afraid of white things (like Moby Dick) but argues in favour of the colour, “This pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” “Every dusky tribe” appears to be represented on the Pequod (with correspondingly cringe-worthy dialects), and when Ahab’s secret boat crew appears, Ishmael describes them thusly:

The companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas; a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.

So, while I was impressed at first, I had to eventually mark Melville down as just another man of his time. Plus ça change.

The following is an example of Melville’s humour:

Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.

And the following is an example of Melville’s lyricism:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

I came into this knowing that Melville had worked on whaling ships, and I had read somewhere that he based his novel on both an actual white whale of ill repute (Mocha Dick, apparently) and the real life sinking of a whaling ship (the Essex ), so I expected Moby Dick to be a credible, and hopefully exciting, account of the 19th century whaling industry. And I think it’s common knowledge that Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest to hunt down the white whale that took his leg — even at the risk of his ship and crew — is used as the prime example of the man vs nature conflict when discussing literature; you pretty much know from pop culture how this plot plays out. What I hadn’t known is just how many literary references Melville would fit in here — from the Bible and the Ancient Greeks, poets and philosophers, Shakespeare and scientists; I can now picture Melville, by the light of a bright-burning spermaceti candle, combing through countless volumes, hunting down rare references to the leviathans of the deep until, thar she blows!, he had found some cetological allusion to make use of. In an early chapter, I was quite enchanted by a chaplain (a former whaler who now ascended his prow-shaped pulpit via retractable rope ladder) as he outlined the story of Jonah from the perspective of the sailors who unwittingly aided in the prophet’s flight from God; what a vivid and thrilling tale he made of that short Old Testament book. The frequent informational chapters (on a whale’s physiology or how to coil rope or harvest sperm) are apparently boring to some readers (or at any rate, are found to interrupt the flow of the narrative for them), but I found it all fascinating and necessary; I can totally understand why Melville wanted to stuff in everything he discovered from his research. If I could point to a misstep it would be making Ahab’s fate too similar to Macbeth’s; the reader of Shakespeare knows not to interpret literally the details surrounding one’s death, whether foreseen by three witches or a “Parsee” in a turban. But I still appreciated Melville invoking Shakespeare.

In the end, Moby Dick was so much more than I expected — and so much more readable than I expected — and I am pleased to have now made it a part of me.

I picked this off my shelf, at this particular moment, as a follow-up read to Fathoms: The World in the Whale  (reviewed here) and they are excellent in concert. I didn't need Rebecca Giggs  to convince me of the majesty of whales, and while I also didn't need to be persuaded as to the senseless brutality of the whaling industry (those wise and playful leviathans, hunted painfully for their oil?), as with Melville's casual racism, I do understand that that industry was an artifact of its time. Still, reading about the fate of the real life Mocha Dick - survivor of apparently over a hundred kill attempts, eventually taken with nineteen harpoons lodged in his body, finally killed, apparently, when he came to the aid of a distraught cow whose calf had just been slaughtered - that story made me sad. Happily, Moby Dick ultimately gets perfect revenge on the little man who wouldn't stop poking him with sharp sticks; take that, Ahab! So, thanks for the happy ending, Mr Melville.

Two By Two

 

Two by two, I thought to myself as I made my way down the stairs. London and me, father and daughter, both of us doing the best we could. Even then, I felt like I was failing her, failing at everything.

I’ve never read Nicholas Sparks before, have only seen one movie based on one of his books, so despite not really being a fan of what I presumed to be his genre, I was happy to pick this up as a book club selection; something “light” for these heavy times. Having now finished Two By Two, and thinking it was plain bad, I’m gratified to see from other reviews that even many long time fans of Sparks found this to be plain bad. Ultimately, this may have been a poor example of Sparks’ work, but even so, I simply cannot imagine ever picking him up again. Hard pass.

Where does one begin when trying to make sense of a story that makes little sense at all? At the beginning? And where is the beginning? Who knows?

In the first chapter, our narrator Russ Green tells us that if he were a wiser man, he would have listened when his older sister asked him if he really thought he should marry Vivian; he should have listened when his father asked him if he thought he should really quit his job and start his own advertising agency at thirty-five; should have listened when his mother warned him to spend as much time as possible with his daughter, London, because it all goes by so quickly. So, knowing that Russ is about to tell us about how his world fell apart, it would have been more impactful if that world had seemed worth keeping intact. Instead, we meet his terrible wife — gorgeous but a shopaholic who refuses domestic duties and turns all of Russ’ complaints back on him — and learn that his job sees Russ working long hours for a ruthless and capricious man who tends to fire employees who don’t let him hit on their wives. As for London, she’s the most special and precious little girl in the world, and while Russ really only gets to see her at bedtime and watch her on the weekends (while Vivian has her Me Time), he doesn’t so much resent time with London as wishes he didn’t have to spend that time in Vivian’s narrowly-prescribed activities. When Russ does decide to open his own agency, Vivian secretly decides to go back to work; and when Vivian is suddenly travelling for half the week, Russ is forced to balance the demands of starting up a business and essentially acting as a single father. Something will have to give.

That’s essentially the plot (with some dumb and dramatic subplots) and it all tied up exactly the way I expected it to; so I could hardly crown Nicholas Sparks the king of plotting. **spoiler** Early on, Mallory asked me what I was reading and I gave her an overview that ended right after Russ’ sister developed a cough after bringing their dad to the hospital because their mother had a terror of him getting “the cancer”. She came into the room again later and asked me, “So, has Marge got the cancer yet?” And I nodded and said, “She just started coughing up blood,” and then gave her another plot update. “Well,” Mal said, “Let me know if Russ and Emily move to Atlanta in the end to be nearer to London or if the billionaire breaks up with Vivian so she has to move back to Charlotte as the third wheel.” Flip a coin, Mr. Sparks, it’s all the same to me.) **end spoiler** But what I really resent is how dumb Sparks treats his readers. Everything is told instead of shown; everything is completely spelled out. Before taking London to the zoo, Russ says about the lions: “I hope they don’t have any mean ones like Scar,” I was referring, of course, to the villain in the movie The Lion King. The mother of a little boy says to Russ: “You get sugar and spice and everything nice,” she said, referring to the nursery rhyme. “Meanwhile, I get the snail.” And, worse, after telling us repeatedly that their father is a gruff and undemonstrative type of guy, Russ explains about their dad renoing his sister’s house when she gets sick:

Marge knew that our dad had never been a man of words, nor had he ever been openly affectionate. But through his labors, she could see that in his own way he was shouting his love for her at the top of his lungs, hoping that she could somehow hear what he’d always found so difficult to say.

That kind of unnecessary observation happens constantly and I totally resent an author who assumes I'm too dumb to figure out something like that for myself. And, I understand that Sparks is essentially a romance writer, but is he a famously wholesome one? Russ complains about going to a comedy night and the first comic was “too profane”; after he tells his sister about his wife doing something particularly terrible, Russ notes, “When she referred to Vivian with a term synonymous with female dogs, I echoed the sentiment”; and when Russ finds himself attracted to another woman, he observes, “Despite the casual mom-at-the-park wardrobe, she seemed to glow with health and vitality. I couldn’t stop staring at her thick hair and unblemished skin.” This really didn’t feel like Sparks was writing for an adult audience.

This was long and dull and pointless; I have more complaints but I'm not putting any more energy into this; plain bad. One and a half stars, rounded up only because I've reserved one star for the worst book I've ever read.

The Liar's Dictionary

 

“I need to talk to you about mountweazels.”
“Mountweazels,” I repeated.
“There are mistakes. In the dictionary,” he said. There seemed to be a sob edging the softness of his voice. I stared at him. He assumed a defensive tone. “Well. Not mistakes. Notquite mistakes. They’re words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.”
“Mountweazels,” I repeated again.
“Other dictionaries have them! Most!” David Swansby said. “They’re made-up words.”
“All words are made up,” I said.
“That is true,” David Swansby replied, “and also not a useful contribution.”

I found The Liar’s Dictionary to be a fun romp through time and language; examining how we assign meaning to words and meaning to life. Author Eley Williams is obviously in love with the English language, and although that made for some nice moments for a word-nerd like myself, Williams also seems in love with the sound of her own voice, and sometimes, the narrative drifted off into meaningless overindulgence for me. The plot here is pretty thin, the characters (and especially the background men) are even thinner, and if this is meant to be social commentary about the history of finding meaning in your work or acceptance of your sexuality, it’s certainly not deep. But it was fun — I had never heard of mountweazels before and I found Williams’ use of them as a narrative device to be fresh and interesting — and I’m happy to have read this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Winceworth slipped the blue index cards into the deck on his desk. His mouth was dry. A private rebellion, a lie without a victim — what claims for truth did anyone really have? What right to define a world? Some trace of his thoughts surviving him was not so bad a thing. He would live for ever.

The plot rotates between two POVs: In Victorian London, Peter Winceworth was a young lexicographer, tasked with assembling words and their definitions for an English dictionary (at a time when many such efforts were underway to be the first to publication), and as he felt invisible at work amongst his fellow scriveners, and as he felt invisible in life (until he met the intriguing Sophia Slivkovna), he amused himself by making up words for feelings and situations that he felt ought to have names. In an act of “private rebellion”, he began to slip these nonwords into the official files of the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.

In the present day, Mallory is a young intern who has been hired by the Swansby heir — the erect and elderly David Swansby — to help him to digitise what there is of his family’s famous dictionary (a reference book famous for having never been finished).

As well as answering calls, it was my job to check the spelling and punctuation of David’s updated words. This was laborious because David hated technology. Also, he had scrimped on buying office equipment. To use a computer in Swansby House was to hate the sight of an hourglass. The one on my computer’s loading screen was silent, monochrome and smaller than a fingernail, six black pixels in its top bulb and ten in the lower. I wondered how many months of people’s lives had been spent staring at this pinch-waisted little graphic popped up in the centre of this desktop. It made me think of the different tidemarks on the keyboard I inherited. Not quite grey, not quite black, not quite brown. Of what: skin? Grime? The word slough came to mind. The word sebum. The record of previous hands resting on this very same piece of plastic. Some of them might have died and this little scuff mark could be the only trace of them left on this earth. In short: this keyboard made me feel a little sick.

David eventually discovers that there are these made-up words in the dictionary, and as Mallory is further tasked with tracking them down, there’s a nice correspondence between the words she uncovers in the present and the situations that we see Winceworth go through in the past (slivkovnion (n.) a daydream, briefly could break your heart; asinidorose (n.), to emit the smell of a burning donkey is rather brilliant in its subtlety). And while I did like, that as a word lover, Winceworth would mull over fascinating vocabulary (abecedarian, smeuse, or widdershins), the following is an example of what I found simply excessive:

He wondered whether anyone would miss him if he just stayed put amongst the weeds, kicking the clocks of dandelions until facelessness and spending the afternoon not amongst paper and letters and words but instead here, head to and in and of the clouds counting birds until the numbers ran out. There were funny, oily little wild birds in the park, some of which he recognised. Starlings with feathers star-spangled and glittersome. One brave bird hopped about his feet for cake crumbs while still more were flitting above his head with the dandelion seeds, blown wishes finding a smeuse in the air. The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show — the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’paths, and wishful seeds, a bird-seed sky as something meddled and ripe and wish-hot, the breeze bird-breath soft like a — what — heart stopped in a lobby above one’s lungs as well it might, as might it will — seeds take a shape too soft to be called a burr, like falling asleep on a bench with the sun on your face, seeds in a shape too soft to be called a globe, too breakable to be a constellation, too tough to not be worth wishing upon, the crowd of birds, a unheard murmuration (pl. n.) not led by one bird but a cloud-folly of seeds, blasted by one of countless breaths escaping from blasted wished-upon clock as a breath, providing a clockwork with no regard to time nor hands, flocking with no purpose other than the clotting and thrilling and thrumming, a flock as gathered ellipses rather than lines of wing and bone and beak, falling asleep grey-headed rather than young and dazzling — more puff than flower — collecting the ellipses of empty speech bubbles, the words never said or sayable, former pauses in speech as busy as leaderless birds, twisting, blown apart softly, to warm and colour even the widest of skies.

(And on the other hand, as silly as it was, I laughed at loud at the scene with the pelican that came next.) Everything about the phone calls — beginning to end — annoyed me, I didn’t find authenticity in the relationship between Mallory and Pip (five years working around the corner from each other and Pip never once dropped by Mallory’s office before?), and the ending of Winceworth’s storyline was telegraphed from nearly the beginning: despite the cleverness of the mountweazels (which weren’t actually mountweazels) speaking across time, the plot for The Liar’s Dictionary really didn’t work for me. Yet still, I had fun with it; no regrets that I picked this up.

And as someone who named one of her daughters "Mallory", I was mildly amused by the following:

She asked my name and checked the correct spelling, ‘Like the mountaineer?’David listened intently to my response and I wondered whether he harboured theories about my first name, its provenance or meaning. He seemed like the kind of person to have opinions about names. If I was descended from someone called Gerolf, I would too. In the past I’ve been asked whether I was named after the vain, uppity character who doesn’t kiss Michael J. Fox in the TV series Family Ties (1982–89). I’ve been asked whether I was named after the psychotic wife who does kiss Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers (1994). People’s minds run, misspellingly, to those Enid Blyton books with their Towers and their jolly hockey sticks (1946–1951) or further back to writers of Arthurian legend. Handsome male lieutenants lost on mountainsides (1924) was a new one, however. What these people must think of my parents, I don’t know. Some books say that Mallory comes from the Old French, meaning the unlucky one. If that’s the case, what I think of my parents, I don’t want to know.

I don't think that the name is that uncommon —  and, yes, we did know that it be translated as "the unlucky one" —  but I do want to point out that in Family Ties, Mallory was Michael J. Fox's sister, so why would she kiss him? Weird observation.

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

 

Nazis steal who you are, turn you to what their Zyklon eyes desire so their balls shudder with righteous loathing, their tongues coil in intoxicated revulsion. Most of their victims become wraiths haunted by memories of what was, if they can remember, and what could have been.

I was rather enchanted by Gary Barwin’s previous novel — Yiddish for Pirates — and his latest, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, returns to familiar ground: Once more tracing the improbable adventures of a Jewish man with punning wordplay, Borscht Belt groaners, and the inkiest of black humour. While the earlier novel tells a swashbuckling tale (as narrated by a parrot, no less), this time we’re set in the jaws of the Holocaust as our hero, the middle-aged Motl, fancies himself a cowboy like the heroes in his paperback Westerns, riding off into the sunset, one step ahead of the Nazis even as he gallops towards them. There’s nothing funny about the real horrors that Motl witnesses — the jokes are the powerful coping mechanism of a powerless people — and as the adventure progresses, Motl is forced to consider whether his spurs and six-gun fantasies put him on the wrong side of the Cowboys vs Indians mythos. Once again, I find myself enchanted by Barwin’s writing and am moved by his use of humour to reconfigure ugly historical fact; you can laugh or you can cry, boychik. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Motl. Citizen of Vilna. Saddlebag of pain. Feedbag of Regret. At forty-five, he had a history. As a Lithuanian Jew, he was pickled in it. But though neither he nor his mother knew it at the time, something had changed. Somewhere, deep down in the overworked mine shaft of his imagination, it had been determined that he would set out on a perilous adventure, this time of his own choosing. He would get up on his horse and ride. And he would have a child. At his age. And avoid being killed. Sometimes you have to save your own bacon, when you’re a Jew.

Due to events he experienced during WWI (oh, the poor Penelopes, the frozen plums, those lost and hairy grails), Motl is compelled to find his way to Switzerland just as the Nazis are starting to round up his neighbours, so he hitches his ol’ hoss (the bull-headed Theodor Herzl) to his wagon, deposits his kvetching mamaleh (Gitl the Destroyer) on the seat beside himself, and sets out for “the lonesome hinterland of Lithuania and the uncertain southeastern border”. Nearly immediately, the quest is sidetracked by efforts to find or save this or that relative, and as the adventure progresses, Motl’s tale is one of narrow escapes, improbable coincidences, and selfless strangers (but isn’t that how every survivor story reads looking back?)

The history of Jews and Indigenous people, a picaresque, a cowboy shoot-’em-up, an adventure tale. One narrow escape after another. One damn unbelievable thing after another. Apparently, this would be another. Two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for supper. This, also, was the woolly history of Jews and the Indigenous. Except the sheep has a gun. But so do the wolves.

I don’t know if it’s only because I read an ARC, but the following (attributed to Hitler) is quoted twice in this book: Why should Germans worry that the soil that made their bread was won by the sword? When we eat wheat from Canada, do we think of murdered Indians? And this equivalence between a judenrein Germany and a “clearing” of the North American Plains seems to be the real crux of this book (apparently the Métis author Cherie Dimaline once quipped in reference to herself and Barwin, “we’re genocide buddies”). And that’s really something to think about: when Hitler makes the equivalence between his murderous efforts and your own country’s bloody founding, maybe your ancestors aren't left unstained. The final section of the book becomes a bit more overt (and less entertaining overall), but I still think that this book presents an important, even urgent, concept to bring into the public forum: We’re quick to recognise the Holocaust as an act of genocide but we continue to think of the cowboys as the good guys who brought order to the Wild West. What an imagination Barwin has, to write this Ballad of Motl the Cowboy; to make it entertaining in the midst of a Holocaust escape, and to make it perfectly relevant to the issues of today.

In Memory of Memory

 

Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies up and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies and misrepresentations — the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past.

Maria Stepanova had always been fascinated by family artefacts — the photos, diaries, letters, and postcards that recorded the lives of this family of Russian Jews who, for the most part, traversed the twentieth century unscathed — and from a very young age, she always knew that when she was old enough, when she had enough life experience and context, she would write about these people known only through sepia-toned images and faded fountain-penned lines. When her aunt passed away, removing one more source of family knowledge, Stepanova — by now a celebrated poet, essayist, and editor — decided it was time to finally pull together everything she knew (family stories overlaid with what is recorded of the times through various art forms), and In Memory of Memory is the result. This is a fairly dense read: the stories, transcribed correspondence, Stepanova’s travels and what she relates about twentieth century art and letters is all fascinating reading, and underpinned with philosophical writing about what can actually be captured about history and memory, this is something more than memoir; certainly something more than one family’s history, and I found the whole to be an education and a starting point for deeper contemplation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

We sat at a long wooden table in the library, which appeared to hold every book written on any matter that might be considered Jewish. I asked questions and got answers. Then the museum advisor, a historian, asked me what I was writing about and I began to explain. “Ah,” he said. “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots — there are plenty of those now.”

“Yes,” I answered. “And now there will be one more.”

Although the family’s Jewishness didn’t figure very prominently in the letters and diaries they left behind, it had made them targets throughout twentieth century Russia — subject to pogroms, asset confiscation under the Bolsheviks, exile and relocation, held under suspicion during “The Jewish Doctor Plot” — and antisemitism isn’t going away anytime soon. Having been raised in the want and fear of Soviet Russia, when the Berlin Wall came down, Stepanova’s parents immediately applied to emigrate to Germany, to their daughter’s surprise. Within a few years, they boarded a train from Moscow, and as Stepanova watched her parents pull away, “a man holding a can of beer glanced at me from out a train door and said: ‘Kill the yids and save Russia.’ It’s all too neat, but that is how it happened.” More recently, Stepanova went to Paris, visiting the hotel where her great-grandmother stayed while studying medicine at the Sorbonne. The current Jewish owner told her, “It’s very hard for us here again. I give us at best another five years in France. After that it will be worse. Far worse.” Between untended Jewish cemeteries, family names that disappear from official records, and knowing that her own direct line had been lucky to avoid the worst disasters of their times, there is a sense of urgency to preserve this family’s story.

Putting my family on general view, even if I do it with as much love as I can muster and with the best words in the best order, is, after all, something of a Ham’s deed, exposing the vulnerable and naked body of the family, its dark armpits, its pale belly. And most likely I would learn nothing new in writing it, and just knowing this made the act of writing even more fraught. Yes, free of scandalous revelation, far from the hell of Péter Esterházy, who found out that his beloved father had worked for the secret police, but also far from the bliss of having always known everything about your people, and bearing this knowledge with pride. Neither of these outcomes were mine. This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.

In this way, In Memory of Memory is about so much more than this one family; it’s also an examination of what can really be known about what we accept as “history” after everyone who lived through it is gone. To that end, Stepanova examines historical work that is not just intertextual, but interdisciplinary. She connects Shirley Jackson’s horror novels with Francesca Woodman’s photography and Joseph Cornell’s art boxes with Salvador Dalí’s painting (just two examples of many such connections), mixing in the essays of Susan Sontag, the poetry of the exiled Osip Mandelstam, referencing music, film, and memoir; leading to countless passages like the following:

Jean Cocteau said that cinema is the only art form that records death at work. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are solely occupied with recording death, and lined up together they make a sort of protofilm — whereas the kilometers of selfies, taken and uploaded for communal access, look like the exact opposite to me: the chronicle of death as it walks amongst us, no longer of any interest to anyone.

Stepanova inserts many letters verbatim between chapters — I particularly relished the ones written by her grandfather’s cousin, Lyodik, that he wrote home to his mother while a soldier during the Siege of Leningrad — and while these certainly have the feel of “truth” about their historical moments, Stepanova also shares that her father refused her permission to include his own letters (upbeat missives written home from his far-flung work assignments), arguing, “I can’t bear to think that someone will read those letters and think that’s what I am.” Knowing that Stepanova’s father (and before him, Lyodik) put a cheerful spin on grim circumstances when writing home, it really brings into question just what can be reconstructed about the past from letters, diaries, and other so-called primary sources. Do the artists and writers do a better job of preserving the truth of the moment? And what is to be made of our own time of oversharing and manipulating every image of ourselves? Where can truth be found? History and historiography, the personal and the philosophically universal; there’s much in here to learn and think on.

I Had a Brother Once: A Poem, a Memoir

 

the things he gave me
are totemic & devoid
at once. a hand drum
from ahmadabad, a
costa rican hammock,
a cuban baseball jersey,
some low red candle
holders from the crate
& barrel outlet store,
a ginger grater he
swore by, a wooden
molinillo that was
a favor at his wedding,
a yerba maté gourd &
metal straw, a kurta pyjama.
on his birthday & the
anniversary of his death,
i gather a few into a pile
& think this, this is all i
have left or tell myself
i had a brother once.

The subtitle says it all: I Had a Brother Once is both a poem and a memoir; a free form verse that tells the story of a life going on after another life ends. Other than the potty-mouthed picture books he’s famous for (Go the F**k to Sleep et al), I didn’t know of Adam Mansbach’s work (which I now understand to be wide-ranging and lauded), and without that knowledge, I thought this to be a strange left turn for (what I mistakenly considered) a humourist who got lucky. What this is is elegiac and expansive; a moving tribute to and a frank exploration of family and what remains when all seems lost. I’m giving this five stars: not because I think it’s the best thing I’ll ever read, but it did move me, and considering the engaging and appropriate format he chose, I can’t imagine how Mansbach could have done this better. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

my father said
david has taken his own life

& i answered as if i didn’t
understand or hadn’t heard.
my reply was what? & he
repeated it. there is plenty
to regret & perhaps this
is insignificant but i
wish i had not made him
say it to me twice.

Mansbach’s brother killed himself just two weeks before Go the F**k to Sleep was officially released; a book that was, at the time, the fastest selling preorder in the world. Already booked on an extensive publicity tour, after David’s funeral, and while still unable to reconcile the brother in hidden pain with the bigger-than-life brother that he knew, Mansbach was forced to spend months appearing on morning television and radio talk shows, answering questions about his potty-mouthed picture book and dreading that someone would have learned about David’s suicide and ask him about that. How could the best and the worst thing to ever happen to you occur just two weeks apart? And how do you live with that? This slim volume seems the result of someone trying to work out an answer to such imponderables of life.

I liked what appeared to be Mansbach’s self-awareness here:

here begins a different
kind of struggle, on this
page, akin to keeping the
steering wheel perfectly
straight, a struggle not
to crane out of this shot, not
to add voiceover, not
to do the one thing i am
trained to, which is make
things legible, impose
structure & plot, motivation,
a frame, a double helix of
narrative to snake through
the spine, to be the spine.
here i am, here we are,
not fifty feet from the news
of my brother’s suicide &
already i can feel a tug at
the reins.

Or while describing his brother’s “out of proportion” idiosyncrasies: in my fiction workshop they would have been derided as lazy, an end run around character development. Something in this poem form allows Mansbach to free himself from the "rules" of long-form prose (while acknowledging them) and also gave him just enough space to relate the highlights of his own life (who knew he was a hip-hop DJ, a Professor of Fiction at Rutgers, or a travelling tech for "the world's gretaest drummer", Elvin Ray Jones?) I also appreciated that being true to himself meant that Mansbach would turn to dark humour at times:

on the curb, emery asked
if he could pray for me &
i said yes & meant it. he
grabbed both my shoulders,
bowed his head. it began
heavenly father. i’d never heard
anyone make up a prayer
before; in judaism that is called
forgetting the words.

And he could also reach for the engaging literary metaphor:

time is longer than rope but
both can strangle you or
knot themselves beneath
your feet & implore you
to climb.

Touching and thought-provoking, I Had a Brother Once succeeds at what it is; I hope it offers healing for the author and others facing such inconceivable loss.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale

 [FATHOM] 1. Anachronism: a six-foot quantification of depth or breadth, originally indexed to a fingertip-to-fingertip measurement (or “arm-span”) and accounting for spools of cordage, cables, cloth, or other materials; commonly used to demarcate the extent of a water column; 2. An attempt to understand: a metaphor for reaching out to make sense of the unknown.

I learned about the sorts of whales we never see and why that might be so: I learned of the whale that has no name, the whale with two voices, whales with two pupils in each eye, and whales puppeted by storms on the sun. I discovered that whales have been the subjects of cuisines and conspiracies, that they have housed monsters and do still. I learned that we change the sounds of whales even where we do not make a noise, that humpbacks have pop songs, and that beluga have tried to speak human tongues. I learned about whale vision, bisonar, and memory: human grief, human love, and interspecies recognition. I set out to draw a few lines between myself, the stories I knew about whales, and the science of our changing seas. By the time I came to the end, I understood that these connections were far from esoteric concerns. Whales, I saw, can magnify the better urgings of our nature and renew those parts of us that are drawn, by wonder, to revise our place and our power in the natural world.

As author Rebecca Giggs tells it, seeing a juvenile humpback whale beached near her Sydney, Australia home — and waiting around with a crowd of others, helpless, as the massive creature died over the course of several days — caused her to question the mystery behind such beachings of seemingly healthy animals. And as she researched that question, Giggs was drawn further into the magnificence of whales, the history of their relationship with humans, the near extinction and incredible recovery of several species, and the more serious challenges they face today, even as most of the world has banned whale-hunting; Fathoms:The World in the Whale is the result of her whale-related research, memories, and travels. Written as equal parts memoir and science book, Giggs’ own thoughts and feelings about what she learns are always at the forefront — which, looking at others’ reviews, can be off-putting to those just looking for the science — and I appreciated everything that she shared in this book, even if some of the writing went over-the-top.

Fathoms is filled with fascinating information about our relationship with whales; from the Stone Age to the Space Age, they have literally loomed larger than life in our conscioussness. A smattering of facts:

• The clinks made by sperm whales last mere microseconds but are among the loudest single-source noises on Earth — louder than a Saturn V rocket — and can be heard over a distance of 1600 miles (from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland).

• Parts of whales used by humans have ranged from the baleen used in corsets and discipline sticks (from where the term “whaling on someone” comes) to the spermaceti (a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales) that lubricated both the looms of the Industrial Revolution and mechanisms inside ICBMs during the Cold War.

• A natural carbon sink, when a large (forty ton) whale dies at sea, two tons of carbon will eventually settle on the seafloor (an amount that would otherwise take two thousand years to accrue).

As for the over-the-top writing: Giggs often waxes poetical (there is more alliteration in the prose than could be accidental; each dusky sky is “empurpled”; our existence “embiggened” by the existence of whales) and she uses arcane vocabulary that sometimes enchanted me (the use of “ensorcelled” or "numen") but often rankled (“apotropaic” or “telluric”). My overall reading experience was positive, but passages like the following would stop me as I wondered if I liked them or not:

What environment was ever more shielded from our collective imagination than the underside of the sea surrounding Antarctica? Unlit omnisphere, far-fetched. White noise; ice shifting, krill krilling. Trundled by see-through salps, orbital sponges, and other questionably animate organisms, the seabed shilly-shallies into murk, lacking all tactility and aspect. No writer, in good conscience, could reach for a word like “terrain” to detail it. A void. The Southern Ocean is galactically dark. A mirror for the Vantablack of the cosmos.

Questions of style aside, Giggs had much to teach me about the pressures that modern-day whales face: their numbers may be rebounding in the decades since the (nearly) global moratorium on their hunting was put into place, but new threats come from the supercarriers that transport our goods over the oceans that disrupt migration pathways (I did not know that the fifteen largest ships annually emit as much carbon as all of the cars on the planet); the sonic air guns that are used for seismic mapping of the ocean floor to find oil deposits disrupt underwater whale calls, affecting mating and the sonar-location of prey; the warming and acidification of the oceans are melting the ice caps and impacting the various species at the base of the food chain; but maybe most impactfully, beached whales are being discovered with their bellies filled with our plastic goods, from countless shopping bags and nylon fishing nets to one whale that had swallowed an entire greenhouse. A ban on single use plastics might make us feel like we’re fixing the world, but I don’t know how to defend whales against swallowing something as large as a greenhouse when it gets blown out to sea from an Almerían hydroponics farm.

Though we may believe in the reality of being materially connected to many, many far-off things, it is only when we hear of these connections breaking, we can confirm that it’s true. Which might be the ultimate value of all these stories: to underline how large our lives are, when they can sometimes feel small and short, slotted into ever narrower silos and categories. The sea is not eternal and unchanging as once we imagined. But neither are we condemned to be changeless. After all, to say that our impacts are global coaxes us toward seeing that our powers to affect positive change are too.

Ultimately, I was charmed by this book because I was happy to learn what Giggs had learned, presented through the lens of her experience; otherwise, I could have just spent the afternoon Googling “whales”. The writing may have tipped towards excess at times, but that, too, was a part of the experience of one human being reaching out with enthusiasm and another — me — willing to be reached. Much to recommend in this; more effort is needed to save the whales.

The following weird passage struck me as something I definitely did like, and as it found no place in my review for Goodreads, I'll put it here:

Do you also recall hearing this? —that sand isn’t what’s recognized as a substance. It’s a scale. Any matter can become a sand if it’s ground right down. Glass, stone, bone, silicon. When every object is forced to self-same size, nothing retains the capacity to be divisibly miraculous. The numen loosens from the particles, particular on a fingerprint, then identical in a dune, and what magic persists drifts into our perception of supranatural forces. Which is to say, that magic resides in a feeling of duration; the haul of a future that’s already set to work decomposing us, scattering our knuckles, our ankles, our littler nodes of cartilage, out to the wind.

Hot Stew

 

“Did you know in Tudor times all the brothels were south of the river in Southwark and it was only much later that they moved up this way to Soho. Stews, they were called then.” 

“Yes, you have told me that before.”

Like her Booker-nominated novel Elmet, Fiona Mozley’s followup — Hot Stew — concerns issues of identity, ownership, gentrification, and those on the margins who get pushed out as the ultra-rich move in. But where Elmet was set in an idyllic and seemingly ageless hinterland, Hot Stew occurs in the seethe of modern-day London, mostly focussing on one crumbling Soho townhouse and the goings-on therein. Along the way, Mozley explores classism, gender politics, sexuality, and money, money, money. The social commentary is still pretty black and white this time around (the poor are good and the rich are evil), but there are some surprises around who holds the ultimate power and there are some nicely funny bits. This was an easy, character-filled read and shows an author building on her strengths; but perhaps not in the direction of more literary awards. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“It’s named for the sound the men and the animals made when there was hunting afoot,” the Archbishop states. “A so and a ho from man and beast. A so ho, a so ho. That’s what they shrieked when they got on their horses and chased deer through the forest. Before there were bricks and windows and sewers, there were grasses and roots and trees and deer. Deer deer deer that brought the men out of the city on horses with a so and a ho.”

In this centuries-old Soho townhouse, there’s a trendy French restaurant on the ground floor, the upper stories serve as illegal flats and a brothel — the highest floor and roof garden are occupied by what may be considered the “main” characters in this book of many; the Nigerian sex worker, Precious, and her “maid” and companion, Tabitha — and the unfinished cellar is peopled with drug addicts, kooks, and other discarded people. All live in a sort of communal harmony until Agatha — the upperclass businesswoman who owns this building, having inherited it along with the rest of her billionaire gangster father’s fortune — decides it’s time to “blank-slate” the building (blank-slating meaning “evicting people from their homes or businesses, gutting the buildings and employing a fashionable architect to redesign them from the inside-out”). Most of the plot involves Agatha’s efforts to evict the tenants, and those tenants fighting back.

Roster puts on the handbrake and turns off the engine. He speaks from the front seat without turning his head. “The business might be taking a new direction, but the world is much the same as it ever was.”

It was interesting to see Precious approach her sex work with dignity — although there is mention of sex-trafficking, pimps, and other forms of exploitation elsewhere, the women in this building have power, choice, and agency; this is simply the work they choose to do and are grateful they have a safe place to practise their arts. More heavy-handedly, we also see an actor getting his big break playing a Medieval brothel-keeper in a Game of Thrones knockoff (and the actresses in this television show seem more debased than Precious and her friends), a heroin addict from the cellar bears the scars of what she has done for her fixes, we learn that Agatha’s mother was a Russian emigre who has supported herself (from the age of fourteen) as the mistress of very wealthy men, and even college girls might turn to escort work in order to pay their fees. There are several upper-class characters trying to figure out how to live a meaningful life, old men trying to forget the past, and while everyone is chasing money as the pinnacle of happiness, no one seems to be able to find love. All of this was highly interesting — if a bit too pat in the end — but it wasn’t terribly deep or insightful. Still, an overall enjoyable read; I’ll round up to four stars.

Second Place

 

I’m telling you all this, Jeffers, because it has to do with the building of the second place and with what we decided to use it for, which was as a home for the things that weren’t already here — the higher things, or so I thought them, that I had come to know and care about one way or another in my life. I don’t mean that we envisaged starting some kind of community or utopia. It was simply that Tony understood I had interests of my own, and that just because he was satisfied with our life on the marsh it didn’t automatically follow that I would be too. I needed some degree of communication, however small, with the notions of art and with the people who abide by those notions. And those people did come, and they did communicate, though they always seemed to end up liking Tony more than they liked me!

Second Place is much more accessible than what I’ve come to expect from Rachel Cusk, but I leave this novel, once again, feeling like I don’t perfectly understand what she’s trying to tell me. I will say that this is incredibly interesting: an interesting format (epistolary) that makes for interesting observations (on art, motherhood, the burdens of femininity, male freedom) while tracing out an interesting plot (which is, apparently, based loosely on real events in the lives of some famous artists). I was intensely interested throughout this entire short read and ended the experience feeling enriched; I cannot ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A brief plot overview: In letters to her friend Jeffers, “M” recounts having been in Paris as a young wife and mother, and after seeing an exhibition of the famous painter “L”, she felt such a connection to his landscapes that she knew she could no longer stay in her marriage. Many years later, after marrying her new husband, Tony, and relocating to his home in the marshlands, they renovated a second cottage on their property to use as a sort of artists’ retreat — to keep M connected to the world she, a semi-successful author, had left behind — and eventually, L accepts an invitation to stay in this “second place”. The majority of the plot recounts this visit and what it taught M about herself.

There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman — but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke. It’s a question that begs an answer, and yet there is no clear and satisfying answer, except to say that this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise. We get our dictionaries and we puzzle it out, and avoid some of the parts we can’t make sense of or understand, and some others we know we’re not entitled to, and voilà!, we participate. It’s a case of borrowed finery, and sometimes of downright impersonation; and having never felt all that womanly in the first place, I believe the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in me than most, to the extent that some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male. The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better — would have been right, would have been how it ought to be — had I been a boy.

Nearly every page of Second Place has something quotable on it, so I can’t help but excerpt with abandon. What Cusk (or, at any rate, “M”) has to say about motherhood:

I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t!

On femininity:

I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself. Brett had seemed to me to have everything, and yet in that moment I saw in a flash that she had nothing at all, and that her intrusive and uninhibited manner was simply her means of survival. She was like one of those climbing plants that has to grow over things and be held up by them, rather than possessing an integral support of her own.

On marrying later in life:

When you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole land masses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation: people could live in and around Tony and me in a way they could never have entered and inhabited the dark core — whether living or dead — of an original marriage. Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels bored, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. The second place was one such bridge, and Tony’s silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

On art:

I think I understood then that his illness had released him from his own identity and history and memory so violently and thoroughly that he had been able at last to really see. And what he had seen was not death, but unreality. This, I believe, was the discovery he had made, and it was what the night paintings told of — and the question I wish I had asked him that afternoon on the marsh was about what came after that discovery, but perhaps L didn’t know the answer to that question any more than the rest of us do.

And I want to make a note on the real life events that inspired this book (so feel free to skip this part if you’d rather not know): This is apparently based on Lorenzo in Taos, a “loosely” epistolary recounting of the time that D. H. Lawrence and his wife stayed at the artists’ colony in Taos owned and run by famed socialite and patroness of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony. In Lorenzo in Taos, the letters are written between Mabel (“M”), the poet Robinson Jeffers, and Lawrence himself (“L”), and while I have no idea how closely the plot of Second Place adheres to the real life events in New Mexico, I’m left wondering if this nonfictional component makes the whole more or less interesting overall. I did find it an odd detail that in Cusk’s novel, M’s husband Tony was adopted as an infant, with no knowledge of his birth family, but as he had a dark complexion and features that look like photographs of Native Americans, M states that “more than anything he looks like one of them”. To then discover that Mabel Dodge Luhan’s husband was Native American made that whole passage feel...weird. Why the uncertainty in Cusk’s version? If their marshland home is presumably in Britain, why not definitively explain why a Native American was brought up there or just not mention his ethnicity? In the same vein, I have no idea what other true details were lifted or adapted or elided (did Mabel find Lawrence’s novels similarly transformative?) and I find myself somewhat less impressed for knowing the inspiration.

And yet...I was mesmerised by the writing here, consistently interested in the storyline, and found myself nodding along and underlining more passages than shared here; Cusk is a master at her craft and this is undeniably art.

2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees

The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford