The Baudelaire Fractal

 

There is a formal and tonal synesthesia inflecting Baudelaire’s spiralling poetic line. The poems trace a turbulence that continued outwards, fractal, from the complex curvature of compositional time — a table in a room by a river — towards future contacts, future refrains, in infinitely productive tangents of temporal plasticity. A verse becomes a poem in prose; a youthful tenderness intertwines with and partly traduces future political despair. This turbulence reinvents itself in any reader as she leans into the embracing poem.

Although admittedly taken out of context, the above is a fair sampling of the writing in The Baudelaire Fractal — a book that would have never registered on my radar if it hadn’t been shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award — and while I found this a dense and challenging work of (presumed) autofiction, the details that author Lisa Robertson included were so far removed from my own knowledge base that I spent quite a bit of interesting time looking into such diverse topics as the life of Charles Baudelaire and his longtime mistress Jeanne Duval, the fashion design of Issey Miyake, the paintings of Émile Deroy; from a more or less simple premise, the details fractalize outwards, providing interwoven commentary on art, gender, freedom, and self-creation. I had no idea what this was about going in, feel like I have only a marginally better idea what it was about at this point, but I have no regrets about my strained efforts to parse what Robertson was getting at, and enjoyed the related research quite a bit. This seems like an outlier on the GG shortlist; it will be interesting to see how it fares.

Though I liked his philosophy of tailoring very much, I did not set out to compose the work of Baudelaire. In truth I’d barely read him.

The publisher’s blurb begins, One morning, the poet Hazel Brown wakes up in a strange hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. And while that is sort of metaphorically true, the blurb seems to promise a kind of plot-rich metaphysical romp that simply never occurs. Rather, The Baudelaire Fractal is a memoirish rumination on literary theory by a middle-aged poet who looks back on her formative years, and recognising that her experiences living at the poverty line in a string of chilly Parisian garrets echoed the formative experiences of Baudelaire a century earlier, this Hazel Brown concludes that the same experiences will light the same fire, will forge the same art (complicated only by gender in this case). The mature Hazel fondly revisits the diaries of her younger self — the Vancouver girl who eschewed education for experience; who knew that freedom could only be found in Paris, experiencing desire and art and poverty, attempting to capture things exactly as they were in her writing — and while Hazel can see the great distance between her two selves, it seems to me that Robertson finds the greatest meaning in such distances: hotel rooms are not homes; knock-off fashion is not couture; the cool trail of a lover’s silver necklace is not the warmth of that lover’s kiss across the length of one’s body; and yet — it is in the space between the two (rather than in the things themselves) that meaning/art/life is found. Or maybe I was just trying way too hard to find a conventional novel in an unconventional project.

I just want to add a few more passages to give a sense of things. Hazel writes about having seen Émile Deroy’s La Mendiante Rousse in the Louvre, adds that Baudeliare wrote a poem about the same young woman (To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl) — as did several other poets in their circle — and explains that she hadn’t actually been a beggar but a professional chanteuse: Street singers had served important social and political functions in Paris, but after Napoleon III enlisted Georges-Eugène Haussmann to raze and rebuild the city, the banks would take over the streets, silencing such singers with registration and censorship laws. In this passage about the unnamed subject of the portrait and poems, Robertson initially had me totally intrigued:

To remember that we’re just clay, we’re pigment, as we’re being it, this is the great immodesty of art. I had a fundamental greediness for this immodesty. It radiated an attractive muteness, just beyond my cognitive limits. Materiality is too mild and limited a term for it. How to describe the sensation?

But from the next sentence, Robertson’s writing spirals everything out beyond my grasp:

Sometimes you shiver or shudder slightly, the instant before entering a room. Your approach has animated a spiritual obscurity. This bodily hesitation is a tradition of entering the negation of names, and it colours the way I perceive all transition. Your body can sometimes deter its own representation; this breach indicates an interiorized covenant or restraint. It’s called the feminine. It’s a historical condition. The movement of perception or description, which are so closely intertwined as to be indiscernible, is not between nominal categories or aesthetic concepts. The girl is not a concept. Her idea has no core or centre; it takes place on the sills, in the non-enunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl’s identity is not pointlike, so it can’t be erased. It’s a proliferating tissue of refusals. Unoriginal, it trails behind me, it darts before me, like my own shadow, or a torn garment. I say unoriginal because once she was named. The removal of her name is an historical choice, so ubiquitous that it seems natural. There is no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate. If her song goes unrecognized it’s because its frame’s been suppressed; her song is enunciation’s ruin. It is a discontinuous distribution, without institution. Always the tumult of her face is saying something to her world. Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy and autonomous fidelity: nameless girl with your torn skirt, there’s nothing left for you but to destroy art.

Quite a lot of The Baudelaire Fractal reads like that, and if it has you nodding your head along in pleasured comprehension, then I reckon you’d appreciate this read even more than I did. I will happily acknowledge that there were many passages like the following that stopped me dead with their beauty:

I would have liked my sentences to devour time. They’d be fat with it. In what sense is anger ornamental? When it permits a girl to pleasurably appear to herself. There was never a room that could hold my anger and so I went to the infinity of the phrase. Obviously it wasn’t simple like that. Anger was my complicated grace.

The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it.

Lisa Robertson is a celebrated poet and this is her first novel: she has no duty to stick to acknowledged forms in either poetry or prose, but this reader couldn’t quite follow her out to the ends of her recursive fractal geometries. But once again, I did enjoy being stretched until I snapped and the experience off the page (the poems, paintings, fashion, and history) enriched the whole. I’m going to round down to three stars simply because I fear rounding up to four will make me look like a poseur who wants to pretend I understood more of this than I did. I understand completely why so many readers have given this five stars.

I honestly could have found excerpts on just about any page that I liked (and understood, lol), so here's one more passage:

My dirty rooms and my slightly dirty hair — for in 1985 I went to the public showers only weekly when I could not clandestinely bathe at my place of work — the musty or stale scent of my vintage woollen coat, which I covered over with the bittersweet religiosity of Youth-Dew perfume, these were marks of honour. The kind of writing I wanted to be would never smell like a literature of clean laundry, swept floors, and bars of white soap. My pens would burst in my bedsheets. My hair would perennially carry the sour odour of sleep. I believed that the poem must stink. Even reading the diary now I seem to detect the long sillage of acrid barks and herbs unctuously covered by vanilla, so that I am unsure whether years ago some amber drops of the viscous liquid actually penetrated the paper or whether my imagination produces this perfume as an insistent and elaborately feminine base note of reading.

 

And I want to include, also, one of Robertson's poems to give a sense of her celebrated work and to acknowledge that I don't really "get" this either.

Envoy

I have tried to say
that, although Love is not judgement
analysis too is a style
of affect
since the scale that rends me vulnerable
has cut, from abundance, doubt
(not that identity shunts
civic ratio or consequence) Sure —
I would prefer to respond to only
the established charms (and forget inconvenience)
but her hair was also a kind of honey
or instrument.

All that is beautiful, from which I choose
even artifice, which I hold above nature

won’t salve these stuttered accoutrements 

A Mother's Love is an Eternal Flame

Beverley Thompson passed away peacefully in the early hours of May 27, 2021. Bev was born to Roy and Ruth Topham on March 13, 1940 in Owen Sound (the good people and the good place that made her and were forever in her heart) and graduated from OSCVI (which she fondly remembered as Owen Sound’s Collection of Various Idiots). Bev turned heads bombing around in her grandfather’s ‘37 Ford (stray boys in the rumbleseat), was the first girl to show up to class in jeans, and twisted the nights away listening to Elvis.

Predeceased by too many of her oldest friends and closest family, Bev is survived by her loving husband of fifty-eight years, James Thompson, and will be forever missed by their children, Dave and Ruthann; their spouses, Krista and Dan; and her grandchildren, Kennedy (Zachary), Mallory, Ryan, and Adam. She is also survived by her sister, Susan (Alex), and many cousins, inlaws, nieces, and nephews. Bev and Jim met in London in 1961, married and raised their children there, before finally moving to Cambridge in 2018 to be closer to their family. Bev worked several jobs over the years but was most famously known as the “Walmart Jewellery Lady”, where her very favourite thing was to hear a small voice calling out “Grannnny” across the sales floor.

Bev loved to talk and to laugh, to play cards and go to coffee with her friends, to read paperback novels (hardcovers were too heavy and bonked her nose when she fell asleep reading in bed); she loved dogs and crime shows, watching NASCAR and going on fast motorcycle rides; she wore purple shirts and Skechers shoes and never left the house without her lipstick on; she spent summers growing up at Sauble Beach, enjoyed family dinners at the farm, and was rewarded in retirement with warm winters in Florida. Bev was not wealthy in goods but never hesitated to share the riches in her heart: there was always a place at her table for someone who needed dinner or company; she could always find something appropriate to donate to strangers in times of emergency; she was a warm, bright light who will continue to shine in the hearts of all she touched.

Bev’s family would like to thank the staff of Hilltop Manor, who took fond and respectful care of her in her final months; we appreciate, in particular, how hard their jobs became over the last year of lockdowns and it is a comfort to know that Bev was in such capable hands. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, there will be no funeral at this time. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Alzheimer Society of Canada in the name of Beverley Thompson.

*****

I suppose this has been a long time coming — I've been writing about my mother-in-law's health issues since the beginning of this blog — but the finality of death is a shock even when it's not exactly a surprise.

Bev moved into long-term care in December of 2019 and we couldn't have anticipated that her 80th birthday (in March of 2020) would be the last time our entire family would be able to get together due to pandemic restrictions. The staff at Hilltop were wonderful — the facility had no deadly outbreaks, unlike too many other Ontario nursing homes — and we were able to enjoy distanced parking lot visits when the weather was fine and had weekly video calls throughout the year. Caring to a fault, Rudy was able to get herself designated an essential caregiver and was eventually able to visit her Mom in person several times a week. Bev needed a blood transfusion in February of 2021 and we were informed at that time that it likely meant her colon cancer was back; as the Alzheimers was also progressing, the difficult decision was made to not pursue treatment for the cancer (as per Bev's wishes from back when she was able to communicate them).

Over the past few months, the dementia and the cancer seemed to be growing — to the point that she would be squirming and moaning in her chair, but unable to articulate what was wrong — but still, Rudy, and then her Dad (the second designated caregiver) were able to visit and advocate for Bev. And then it was discovered that Jim had a mass on his kidney, and after some fretful weeks of noncommunication from his surgeon, it happened so quickly that the mass was removed and Jim was sent home to recuperate.

It was a lucky thing that Ontario went into another lockdown around this time — my work was closed and I was able to spend my days hanging out with my father-in-law — and at that time, Dave was able to get himself declared the second essential caregiver for his Mom, finally sharing some of those duties with his sister. But when Jim developed an infection and had to be hospitalised, Dave became his designated visitor, trying to juggle visits with both of his parents while working full time and dealing with COVID-related stresses at the plant.

Over the past couple of weeks, Bev became less and less responsive, and the longer Jim remains in the hospital, the more the stress and lack of proper sleep have made him confused, and sometimes, delusional. When Bev stopped waking up in the morning, her doctor moved her into palliative care, and that meant that any of her family could visit (we didn't even need the rapid COVID testing), and I was able to go for a few visits, as did most of us — but her own husband couldn't make it (as of today, he's been in hospital for five long weeks). The last evening that Bev was alive, Dave and Rudy had a long visit with her, knowing that they were at the end. Bev passed peacefully just a few hours after they left.

When Dave got the news the next morning, he broke down crying, saying, "Thank God." Bev's body knew that it was done — she spent the last few days of her life refusing nutrition and hydration — and although she went quietly in her sleep, this was the welcome cessation of pain and confusion that we were all wishing for her.

Dave arranged to have a funeral home collect her body and Hilltop told us that they would have an "honour guard" to see Bev off if we wanted to join them. When we arrived at the home, there were a couple dozen residents and staff standing outside the front door and a solemn man with a black suit and bowed head stood sentinel behind a gurney; my mother-in-law's diminished body barely making a lump under layers of colourful quilts. As we approached the line, an ancient woman in a wheelchair — in a high and thready voice — was singing the Our Father (which was not exactly in keeping with what this secular family would have wanted at this moment, even if Bev herself would have recognised the social convention), and as soon as she had warbled out Ah-mennnnn, she started in on singing the Hail Mary, too. It was a trifle surreal. The Head Nurse cut off any chance at a third song and read out her own prayer and final farewell, and as the staff hung back to offer us their memories and condolences after Bev's body had been driven away, it was obvious that Bev had been a sweet and joyful presence in the home.

Next was the hardest part of all: Dave was able to get special permission from the hospital to allow him and his sister to visit their Dad and break the news, and I can only imagine the scene as it had been described to me: each of them holding one of their Dad's hands, valiantly holding back the tears as they explained that their Mom had passed overnight, trying to determine if he was following along (he was). Dave and Rudy were able to get their Dad's permission to have their Mom cremated, and her remains will be waiting for us when we're all able to get out to the gravesite. How doubly sad and triply complicated to have COVID restrictions and the illnesses of others interfere with what we would have wished for Bev's final days (even her sister, Susan, had been in hospital herself at the time after a series of small strokes left her loopy with vascular dementia; so few had an opportunity to say goodbye and now there won't even be the opportunity for a viewing.)

The last time I visited Bev, the night before her last night, I kissed her forehead as I left and brushed back her hair and for the first time that evening, she made a small effort to raise her head from her pillow, even though her eyes remained screwed shut; there was the barest passage of breath through her throat that may have been an attempt at speech. I believe she knew I was there and that we had our goodbye.

Dave hasn't stopped crying since. He has said many times over the past few years that with the Alzheimers, he had already lost his mother and had said goodbye a while ago. However, having her actually, permanently, gone has struck him hard. We were at the Sauble Beach property over the weekend — Bev's favourite place on Earth, and I do believe that she understood that we got it back into the family last summer — and Dave was throwing himself into landscaping in the hot sun, and he asked Rudy to massage his painful jaw (apparently the recent stress has had him clenching and grinding his teeth, causing microcracks), and he proceeded to pass out; sending the rest of us scrambling. And on a related note: Bev had apparently written letters to Dave, Rudy, me, and the girls back in 2005 (the first year they went to Florida for the winter) and had left them with her will: the girls' were sweet messages about how proud their Granny was of them, mine said that she couldn't have asked for a better daughter-in-law, and Dave's said that he works too hard, looks so tired, and needs to learn to take it easy. After passing out, he says he's going to listen to his Mama.

There has been a huge display of love and memories after the announcement of Bev's passing, and Dave is a little upset that most of it has been on Facebook and through private messages; he would have loved for people to post on the funeral home's site so that everyone would see the hundreds of other messages. Dave says that his Mom confessed to him more than once that she wishes she had done more with her life, and she might have been surprised to see the outpouring of love that we're seeing now: Bev made the world a better place with a huge and loving heart; sharing that love with others is the most that anyone could hope to do with this brief and bewildering life. This world is poorer without her, but as Dave said, thank God the suffering is over.

Em

 

The word em refers to the little brother or little sister in a family; or the younger of two friends; or the woman in a couple. I like to think that the word em is the homonym of the verb aimer, “to love,” in French, in the imperative: aime.

There is a painting reproduced in Em by the Quebecois artist Louis Boudreault (an image used on the cover of the novel’s original French language release) that depicts a cardboard box with many threads coming out of its flaps; the threads twisted and tangled hopelessly together. Author Kim Thúy writes, “If I knew how to end a conversation, if I could distinguish true truths, personal truths from instinctive truths, I would have disentangled the threads for you before tying them up or arranging them so that the story of this book would be clear between us.” If that sounds a little confusing, it’s clearly by design: Em has the feeling of nonfiction — of a biographical investigation into the history of some specific people who survived the Vietnam War; where they came from and where they ended up — and chapters follow a thread of connection from one character to another and another; twisting back and entangling with people we’ve met earlier. And because this format has the feeling of real and messy life, and because Thúy includes information from the historical record, everything about this novel feels true; which is horrifying in the wartime details and often uplifting, as in the care that orphans would show to one another on the streets of Saigon (“In every conflict zone, good steals in and edges its way right into the cracks of evil.”) This is not a long work, the chapters are short and waste no words, and I believed every bit of it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The Americans speak of the “Vietnam War,” the Vietnamese of the “American War.” This distinction is perhaps what explains the cause of that war.

The novel begins on a rubber plantation in what was once known as Indochina, with a white overseer falling in love with the young girl he plucked from the fields to share his bed. The daughter who was born of this union, Tâm, “grew up between Alexandre’s privilege and power, and the shame of Mai’s betrayal of her patriotic cause”. Orphaned when her parents found themselves trapped between rival warring camps, I was actually relieved to read that Tâm’s nurse smuggled her to Saigon and enrolled the girl in school, settling in to normal life. But when the nurse’s first grandchild is born, and Tâm accompanies her back to their old village of My Lai to celebrate his first month of life, they are present when Charlie Company shows up:

The night before, Tâm had lain down a child; the next day, she awoke with no family. She went from artless laughter to the silence of adults whose tongues have been cut out. In four hours, her long, girlish tresses were undone, as she faced the spectre of scalped heads.

Threads twist and tangle and the story visits with orphans in Saigon, with the tragedy associated with Operation Babylift, with half-American orphans being adopted in the States, with these refugees finding one another, and falling in love, and some of them, opening nail salons. (Fun fact: Half of the women who have had nail salon manicures have received them at a salon operated by a Vietnamese refugee. Less fun fact: Those Vietnamese refugees who didn’t contract cancer from the Agent Orange and other defoliants sprayed on their childhood homes probably developed cancer from exposure to the carcinogenic components of nail polish.) But no matter what life brings, how could anyone forget such a traumatising childhood?

Tâm can describe in detail how the soldiers slipped the ace of spades into their helmet straps, sleeves rolled up above their elbows, the cuffs of their pant legs tucked into their boots. On the other hand, she remembers no soldier’s face. Maybe war machines don’t have a human face.

Em isn’t a book of history — it’s a book of people and connections — and although I couldn’t personally say what started the Vietnamese War (or, the American War if one prefers), Thúy presumes some such knowledge on the part of the reader. In the end, though, I got the sense that Thúy was writing for her own community; to remind the Vietnamese people, wherever they find themselves, that although global events had once set the north and south against one another, in the lead up to the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, they would be better served remembering how interwoven their threads remain:

This fiftieth anniversary will confirm in all likelihood that memory is a faculty of forgetfulness. It forgets that all Vietnamese, no matter where they live, descend from a love story between a woman of the immortal race of fairies and a man of the blood of dragons. It forgets that their country was surrounded by barbed wire that transformed it into an arena and that they found themselves adversaries, forced to fight each other. Memory forgets the distant hands that pulled the strings and the triggers. It only remembers the blows, the aching pain of those blows that bruised roots, snapped ancestral bonds, and destroyed the family of immortals.

Again, this novel is quite short, the chapters like snapshots, but I found it incredibly impactful. It may not be to everyone’s tastes, but I have long been a fan of Kim Thúy and Em is a valuable piece in the overall puzzle of her work. Loved it.

Valentine

 

Hey there, Valentine. His words took the ugly right out of the drive-in, his soft drawl marking him as not from here, but not that far away either. Gloria’s mouth went dry as a stick of chalk. She was standing next to the lone picnic table, a shaky wooden hub in the midst of a few cars and trucks, doing what she always did on a Saturday night. Hanging around, drinking limeades and begging smokes, waiting for something to happen, which it never did, not in this piss-ant town.

For a novel that starts in the aftermath of a brutal attack on a young girl, I found Valentine to be nearly completely devoid of emotional impact. When I learned that author Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that explained everything to me: what is it about that program that teaches writers to overwork a story until all the juice is drained out of it? This is a decent expose of West Texas culture in the late 70’s (and as Wetmore herself grew up in Odessa where the novel is set, I’ll assume this is a fair rendering), but very little here really spoke to me. I guess we'll see what book club makes of this one.

When the time comes and I am called to take the stand, I will testify that I was the first person to see Gloria Ramírez alive. That poor girl, I will tell them. I don’t know how a child comes back from something like this.

I will say that the opening to Valentine is propulsive: Fourteen-year-old Mexican-American Gloria, beaten and violated, decides to make a break from her sleeping attacker as soon as the sun breaks the horizon. Spying a farmhouse in the distance, Gloria crosses the brambly desert barefoot, barely summoning the energy to knock on the home’s door when she finally arrives. The next chapter is from the POV of twenty-six-year-old Mary Rose — heavily pregnant and home alone with her nine-year-old daughter — as she opens the door to Gloria and then stares down the dangerous-looking young man who comes speeding up in his truck to fetch his “girlfriend”. These two chapters gave me a strong impression about what this book would be about, but that impression was wrong: Instead of focussing on how Gloria survives the attack or ramping up to a big trial sequence, POV will rotate between four more girls and women, some of them not connected at all to the initiating event. This does serve to give a good overview of the time and place (and especially the racism and misogyny that Gloria’s attack brings to the surface of they who would otherwise think of themselves as decent people), but everything feels superficial; more wide than deep.

At one point, a retired teacher (Corinne, whose story of her life with her recently departed husband was very sweet) states “Stories can save your life”, and that’s pretty much the central premise of Valentine. Everyone is always telling stories, of other times and other places, and if life in Odessa sounds hard in the present, it was worse before (and if a woman in the past didn’t kill herself when times got real tough, she was probably a witch.) With an unending drought and the price of cattle falling, life in Odessa is hard for the men:

We lose the men when they try to beat the train and their pickup trucks stall on the tracks, or they get drunk and accidentally shoot themselves, or they get drunk and climb the water tower and fall ten stories to their deaths. During cutting season, when they stumble in the chute and a bull calf roars and kicks them in the heart. On fishing trips, when they drown in the lake or fall asleep at the wheel on the drive home. Pile-up on the interstate, shooting at the Dixie Motel, hydrogen sulfide leak outside Gardendale. Looks like somebody came down with a fatal case of the stupid, Evelyn says when one of the regulars shares the news at happy hour. Those are the usual ways, the ordinary days, but now it is the first of September and the Bone Springs shale is coming back into play. Now we will also lose them to crystal and coke and painkillers. We will lose them to slipped drill bits or unsecured stacks of pipeline or fires caused by vapor clouds. And the women, how do we lose them? Usually, it’s when one of the men kills them.

Between supporting their men, constantly sweeping the red dust out of the corners of their homes, and keeping their lipstick fresh under the critical gaze of their fellow women, life is hard in Odessa for the ladies, too:

When I ask myself what is lost between Robert and me, Mary Rose paused and looked at her hands, turned them over and over. Well. How would I even know? Shit, I got my first cheerleading outfit when I was still in diapers. All of us did. If we were lucky, we made it to twelve before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman who just thought we ought to know the score, let us know why we were put on this earth. To cheer them on. To smile and bring a little sunshine into the room. To prop them up and know them, and be nice to everybody we meet. I married Robert when I was seventeen years old, went straight from my father’s house to his. Mary Rose sat down on a lawn chair and leaned her head against the patio table and began to cry. Is this what I’m supposed to do? she said. Cheer him on?

Harder still is life for Gloria: Although born in Texas, popular opinion in Odessa in the wake of the attack is that Mexican girls grow up quicker; if Dale never asked her age and she got into his truck willingly, the locals muse, how is she not responsible for everything that happened to her? (And although I understand Wetmore’s thinking behind using this particular attack to explore racism and misogyny in Odessa, I’m left feeling a bit uncomfortable that Valentine isn’t really Gloria’s story in the end; the subject and the character that Wetmore created both deserved better.) Standing with dignity in the face of racial slurs — hurled by neighbours, lawyers, a kid at the pool — Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Odessa have it the hardest of all:

There are a dozen stories Victor could tell his niece. So many! But tonight he can only think of the sad ones. Ancestors hanged from posts in downtown Brownsville, their wives and children fleeing to Matamoros to spend the rest of their lives looking across the river at land that had been in their families for six generations. Texas Rangers shooting Mexican farmers in the backs as the men harvested sugar cane, or tying men to mesquite trees and setting them on fire, or forcing broken beer bottles down their throats. They did it for fun, Victor could tell her. They did it on a bet. They did it because they were drunk, or they hated Mexicans, or they heard a rumor that the Mexicans were teaming up with some freedmen or what was left of the Comanche, and they were all coming for the white settlers’ land, their wives and their daughters. And maybe sometimes they did it because they knew they were guilty, and having already traveled so far down the path of their own iniquity, they figured they might as well see it through. But mostly, they did it because they could.

In the Afterword, Wetmore writes that two of the chapters had been previously published as short stories, and the rotating POV gives this whole thing the feel of a short story collection connected by the town of Odessa, not by the attack. Which is fine: I could have emotionally connected to a novel based on Gloria’s experience — even one that rotated between Gloria and Mary Rose — but Valentine tries to do too much, spreads the material far too thin, and leaves me feeling nothing at all.

This Eden

 

She looked again at the old compressed-air plant. It seemed to her brighter, more electric, than the modern buildings around it, even though it was dark and their windows shone with light. It looked as if it would dissolve into sparkles if you touched it, revealing its secret, a shortcut to the next level of this game, some other Eden in some other multiverse. Maybe Towse was right to worry about the simulation hypothesis. Maybe nothing she could see was real. Was someone, or something, reeling her in? Was it Towse?

What I liked best about Ed O’Loughlin’s last novel (Minds of Winter) was its history-spanning, globe-trotting audaciousness; its fascinating, disparate threads knotting themselves into a thoroughly satisfying tapestry. While his latest, This Eden, is set firmly in the present — the action plays out right up to the moment people around the world start wearing medical masks when they venture outside — it is no less audacious, trotting itself over even more of the globe in a thrilling game of Spy vs Spy while a Doomsday Clock ticks its steady way towards midnight. Fintech, AI, Black Ops, War Games; every Deep State nightmare scenario is playing out at once and even the characters don’t know who the good guys are; please tell me none of this can happen irl. I wasn’t quite as captivated by the characters this time around, but O’Loughlin had me on the edge of my seat through most of this and I will happily read whatever he comes out with next. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There ’s an old rule of thumb in intelligence: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times or more, it’s enemy action.

This quote is attributed to Ian Fleming, but this isn’t your parents’ James Bond tale. I don’t want to give any of the plot away, so suffice it to say that this is a story of an Everyman who gets caught up in “enemy action” and there are plots and counterplots, unlikely coincidences, betrayals, and subterfuge. O’Loughlin writes gorgeously as he flings his characters around the world — from drizzly Vancouver Island to the rubble-strewn Gaza Strip to the lush junglescape of Uganda and beyond — and the details of the threats to humanity are compelling because they sound all too plausible. The plot: intricate.

Maybe he didn’t understand, as Aoife did, that fictions are also a kind of war game, models that run in the mind of the reader, designed to compute not so much what might happen as how it might feel.

There is much discussion of books and philosophy and the nature of (un)reality. The themes: intriguing and accessible.

And I want for O’Laughlin to do most of the talking here, so I present some more of his big ideas:

• I just wanted to see what would happen next. You have to dabble in empiricism, every now and then, if you want to stay in touch with reality. I still believe there's a reality, by the way. I’m very old-fashioned like that.

• Some day – not, from the look of it, very far in the future – when the American empire is also a legend of decline, like King Solomon’s Mines, or the lost Christian kingdom of the great Prester John, archaeologists will trace its ruin in aerial photos of its overgrown airstrips, buried concrete floor slabs, and the acacias that grow greener over former pit latrines. But for now, burly white men still do weights in moon bases deep in the bush, and Galaxy C-5s thunder skywards from domestic airfields – in this case, Westover Air Reserve Base, near Springfield, Massachusetts – on unlisted flights to Manda Bay in Kenya, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, or – in this case, again – to Africa Command’s main dark site in Uganda, a fortified compound in Entebbe Airport, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria.

• He believes that some day soon, in a decade or two at most, the surging power of artificial intelligence, combined with the processing heft of quantum computing, will make it possible for those who control the technology to encode their own souls and become immortal, to live on as charges in silicon synapses. He believes you can cast a soap bubble in glass.

• Cash is our last freedom. Without it, whoever controls the machines controls all the money, and controls all of us. In The Handmaid’s Tale, they turned women into serfs overnight by transferring all their money into accounts owned by their men. Soon, that won’t be fiction: they could switch off anyone they don’t like. But as long as there ’s cash, we still have some wriggle room.

(Even before the events of the past week as I write this, O’Laughlin was definitely taking a side in defending Hamas and I’m just putting it out there):

• These guys are Hamas, Aoife. Not Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Say what you like about your old-school Muslim Brotherhood, they know how to network. And they usually stick to their deals.

I think that O’Laughlin is a very talented storyteller — I couldn’t predict where this was going, and I liked that; the ending felt earned and satisfying — and I can see this having wide appeal.

Oh William!

 

 

“Why are we here?” I asked William. “Tell me again.” And he said, “Because this is where Lois Bubar’s husband came from. Don’t you listen?” And I thought, Oh William. Jesus, William. This is what I thought.

The third volume in Elizabeth Strout’s Amgash Series, Oh William! follows My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible, and while I may not have found this to be quite as impactful as the first two in the series, I did find it gentle and thoughtful and a lovely way to spend a couple of afternoons. We’re back in Lucy Barton’s head, and what a fraught place that is to be as Lucy joins her first husband William — still each other’s best and oldest friend despite many years divorced — as William navigates a pair of disruptive circumstances; and whether they are travelling together or picking up the phone to call the other the moment something significant happens in either of their lives, Lucy and William are frequently confronted with hard pearls of truth about themselves (as offered by the person who knows them best in the world) or they are forced to revisit and reevaluate memories from the past. Everything about this novel feels true to life — particularly the unedited storytelling style that Lucy employs as she attempts to explain what she means at every moment (and I’d imagine it takes a lot of editing to make that voice seem so natural and spontaneous) — and I thoroughly enjoyed this read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Please try to understand this:
I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say — oh, I don’t know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.

I quoted this passage because it demonstrates what I mean by Lucy’s “unedited” storytelling style — for a successful author, Lucy seems to really struggle to express herself in words and I was constantly struck by the thought, “Just who is she telling all this to?” — but I also like it because as a successful author, Lucy is repeatedly being recognised in her travels — asked to sign some books in a library, seeing her novels on a stranger’s bookshelf, having details from her memoir quoted back to her — I can’t imagine anyone feeling less invisible (which makes for a nice irony). Even as she approaches seventy years old, despite William calling her “self-absorbed”, Lucy isn’t terribly self-aware.

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

Over the course of this novel, Lucy and William will each gain some self-awareness (thanks to moments of exasperated honesty, always followed by gentler words), and while Lucy’s memories of their marriage make it clear that it wasn’t good for either of them, it’s the action in the present that explains why they’re still so close — when William needs to take a trip to his past, who else would he take along but the only one who was there with him? Interesting things do happen in this book, but it’s not really about the plot: the voice, the relationship, the growing self-knowledge, these all add up to a satisfying reading experience that made me pleased to have spent a bit more time with Lucy Barton. Rounding up to four stars.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

 

When I first paged through (The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals), I wondered if it might be an ambitious hoax. Here were bears formally excommunicated from the Church. Slugs given three warnings to stop nettling farmers, under penalty of “smiting.” But the author, a respected historian and linguist, quickly wore me down with a depth of detail gleaned from original documents, nineteen of which are reproduced in their original languages in a series of appendices. We have the itemized expense report of a French bailiff, submitted in 1403 following the murder trial of a pig (“cost of keeping her in jail, six sols parisis”). We have writs of ejectment issued to rats and thrust into their burrows. From a 1545 complaint brought by vintners against a species of greenish weevil, we have not only the names of the lawyers but early examples of that time-honored legal tactic, the stall. As far as I could tell, the proceedings dragged on eight or nine months — in any case, longer than the lifespan of a weevil. I present all this not as evidence of the silliness of bygone legal systems but as evidence of the intractable nature of human-wildlife conflict — as it is known today by those who grapple with it professionally. The question has defied satisfactory resolution for centuries: What is the proper course when nature breaks laws intended for people?

I like Mary Roach: I like the enthusiasm she brings to her research, I like her voice and her compassion, her globe-trotting travel writing and her gentle humour. But I don’t know if I love her books: Whenever I see a new release, I think, “Oh yeah, I like Mary Roach”, but I’ve never given one of her books more than three stars. When I saw that Fuzz was available on NetGalley, I once again said, “Oh, yes please”, and again, three stars (which, in my reckoning, is a solid read, just not life-altering). I’m sure I will read Roach again — I will always think of her as an author I like — and for other readers who like her, I’ve no doubt they’ll like this book, too. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Animals don’t follow laws, they follow instincts. Almost without exception, the wildlife in these pages are simply animals doing what animals do: feeding, shitting, setting up a home, defending themselves or their young. They just happen to be doing these things to, or on, a human, or that human’s home or crops. Nonetheless the conflicts exist, creating dilemmas for people and municipalities, hardships for wildlife, and material for someone else’s unusual book.

Between that opening bit about the history of people suing animals and the publisher’s blurb (What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? ), I thought this book was going to be quite a bit weirder than it actually is. What Fuzz actually entails is Mary Roach joining wildlife officers around the world as they try to find the most humane methods of preventing animals from inconveniencing the humans who have decided to build a home in the animals’ territory. This can involve hunting, trapping and relocating, poisoning, and at the cutting edge of wildlife control, gene-editing. The stories, and the overall format of Roach learning something and seeing where that leads to next, became a little samey-same, but it was consistently interesting (except for maybe where the chapter about “killer trees” — in which Roach joined some arborists as they lopped the tops off of dead Douglas firs on Vancouver Island — led into a chapter on the killing potential of castor beans and rosary peas; semi-interesting but felt really off topic.)

As always, Roach is an interesting storyteller with an offbeat sense of humour:

• I collect my lunch sack and follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?”

• The tiny bodega isn’t so much ransacked as flattened. A wall of corrugated steel lies crumpled beneath a concrete support beam. On another occasion, an elephant broke into Padma’s home while she slept. This is a place where “the elephant in the room” is not a metaphor, where elephant jokes are no joke. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Probably around 11: 00 p.m.

• “And there is the border with Italy!” I follow Tornini’s gaze to the massive wall that surrounds the Holy See. A gull glides over. There’s your symbol of peace, I think to myself. A bird, any bird, soaring over walls, ignoring borders! Peace, freedom, unity! It’s possible I’ve had too many espressos.

And, of course, I learned plenty: “Gooney bird” comes from the term used by the US military for the albatrosses that live on Guam and would fly into jet engines; birds’ innards will not explode if they eat raw rice at weddings (just note the birds that help themselves to rice growing in farmers’ fields); “compensatory reproduction” describes the process by which species will increase their litters and broods to make up for numbers lost to mass culling. Roach always introduces interesting vocabulary and some of my favourite new words were: frass (insect excreta), snarge (the remains of a bird after it has collided with an airplane), kronism (the eating of one’s own offspring).

For centuries, people have killed trespassing wildlife — or brought in someone to do it for them — without compunction and with scant thought to whether it’s done humanely. We have detailed protocols for the ethical treatment and humane “euthanizing” of laboratory rats and mice, but no formal standards exist for the rodents or raccoons in our homes and yards. We leave the details to the exterminators and the “wildlife control operators,” the latter a profession that got rolling when the bottom dropped out of the fur market and trappers realized they could make better money getting squirrels out of people’s attics.

It’s probably not surprising that Roach comes down on the side of the animals everywhere they come in conflict with humans; not only are the critters just doing what critters do (and rarely are they doing as much harm to humans as the media likes to portray), but short of driving a species to extinction, we’re not very good at managing animal numbers or behaviours. This really isn’t the book I expected it to be (the subtitle about nature “breaking the law” is kind of misleading) but I enjoyed myself and learned some things; I will read Mary Roach again.

Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past

 

The trees are so tall I can hardly see their branches, their green foliage hanging in flat sprays that droop ever so slightly near their crowns, the way shaggy hair might drape around one’s neck. The greenery's sloping shape, held against the military exactitude of the trunks, resembles to me the Chinese character that builds forests: 木 mu (the wood radical). Arboreal 木 spreads wide and tall. And like timber set to work, 木 builds the words around it: 樹 shu ("tree"), 林 lin ("grove, woods, or forest") and 森林 senlin ("forest"), the multiplicity of tree shapes indicating the scale of the woodland. 木 carries a vastness of possibility, like the giants in these hills. And at their scale, just two trees would make a forest.

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian author (with a Welsh father and a Taiwanese mother) who has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics, and Two Trees Make a Forest is her prize-winning memoir about seeking meaning in the land of her mother. With a particular focus on the flora and fauna of Taiwan, Lee gives an account of the three months she spent there — climbing mountains and brushing up her Mandarin while exploring the history of both Taiwan and her own family — but just as her views from the tops of Taiwanese mountain peaks were usually obscured by cloud and fog, finishing this book makes me feel like something important was accomplished without me being able to quite see what it was. There is so much packed in here, not all of it totally interesting or relatable to me, and I’m not left feeling like I’ve learned much of anything; this is certainly well written at the sentence level, but didn’t add up to that something more I look for in a memoir.

Our versions of the truth so often dwell in the language we choose, but the words we use have consequences: they signify allegiances, shared histories, harms, and losses. In my childhood I heard phrases like “Taiwan, the true China” or “Chinese, but from Taiwan,” and rarely felt pressed to make sense of them. The task of naming so often exceeded me. Instead I felt a discomfort, like an amorphous thing. My complacency, I know now, was a privilege afforded by distance, by the ease of light skin and features that passed for whiteness. I do not know why we did not visit Taiwan during my childhood, and I never asked. Instead, I negotiated the world as a dual citizen of Britain and Canada, casting my life in those frames of reference. The question of whether to call myself Taiwanese or Chinese felt a complication too far. I often found myself with too many names, too many homes, and no fixed sense of which order to arrange them in. A use of just one was an erasure of another. For most of my life — until Gong’s Alzheimer’s, until his death — I gave it little thought.

Lee’s maternal grandparents (Gong and Po) were both from mainland China and met after each of them had settled in Taiwan in the concluding years of the Chinese Civil War. After only spending twenty or so years there, Gong and Po relocated to Niagara Falls, Canada with their only daughter (Lee’s mother) when she was a teenager; and as the grandparents knew that they would never be allowed to return to either China or Taiwan, theirs was a family tree without roots or branches. As neither of them liked to talk about the past, Lee was surprised to discover that her grandfather had written a meandering memoir-like letter before his death and that some biographical clues would be found among her grandmother’s effects after Po’s passing; these clues would inspire Lee’s trip to Taiwan in search of herself.

On the inside cover of Two Trees Make a Forest, it calls this “An exhilarating, anticolonial reclamation of nature writing and memoir”, and I can’t help but get hung up on that word “anticolonial”. I honestly have no idea what that means in this sense. Lee doesn’t explain anything about her absent Welsh father here (her parents divorced and Lee seems to have more closely identified with her mother’s half of her heritage, as one would), but even if she has disavowed the British half of herself, is she really half Taiwanese just because her mother was born there? And what does being “Taiwanese” really mean anyway? As she shares information about Taiwan’s history, Lee eventually explains each of the countries that colonised the island over the years — her grandparents’ flight to Taiwan coincided with the end of Japanese rule and the birth of the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name) — so doesn’t that technically make her grandparents colonisers? With the island’s indigenous peoples (two per cent of its population) forced into the hills and out of power, and with its shaky democracy vainly attempting to prevent reabsorption into the People’s Republic of China (with most world bodies siding against Taiwan’s fight to maintain independence), what is “anticolonial” about someone of ethnic Chinese descent claiming Taiwanese heritage?

For so long I have treated Taiwan as a haunted place, guided by memories that are not mine. I’ve carried the weight of my grandfather’s death into the landscape, guilt and grief intermingled. But his death and Po’s have brought me new possibilities for knowing. Sadness has lightened, grown lean on my bones. I find in the cedar forest a place where the old trees can span all our stories, where three human generations seem small. The forest stands despite us.

One of my favourite passages: “A taxi driver asked me why my Mandarin was so good for a foreigner. ‘My mother is from Taiwan,’ I explained, and he turned on me in reprimand. ‘Then why is your Mandarin so poor?’” That feels like both the corniest old joke and an arrow to the heart of being alienated from one’s heritage; I do understand what Lee was going for with this experience and this book — I guess I’m mostly just distracted by the politics (and bored by some of the details). Through her grandmother’s effects, a distant cousin was contacted and visited, and just like that, Lee’s small family grew a little bigger. Just as with Mandarin, where adding the character for wood (木) to one more wood (木) makes a whole forest (木木), you only need one relative to join you in making a whole family. (On a side note: I see that Lee’s last book, Turning, was about her quest to swim in a different lake around Berlin, where she now lives, every week for a year, and that looks more interesting to me than this; and again, her writing is definitely strong enough to make me want to revisit her.)