According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the quarter century following the introduction of OxyContin, some 450,000 Americans had died of opioid-related overdoses. Such overdoses were now the leading cause of accidental death in America, accounting for more deaths than car accidents — more deaths, even, than that most quintessentially American of metrics, gunshot wounds. In fact, more Americans had lost their lives from opioid overdoses than had died in all of the wars the country had fought since WWII.
There is a Chinese proverb that says, “Wealth does not pass three generations”, and in a way, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Family explores this adage. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe takes a deep dive into explaining how three Depression-era brothers created an empire from nothing; how their children rapaciously turned a multi-million dollar conglomerate into a multi-billion dollar one; and how the third, current, generation is so entitled and out of touch that they insist on enjoying their family’s vast fortune while disavowing any connection to its accumulation. The book ends with the bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma — the exclusive manufacturer of OxyContin, wholly owned by the Sackler family — and universities, galleries, and museums around the world removing the Sackler name from their buildings. The Sackler family may have funnelled much of their wealth into offshore accounts in anticipation of their current legal imbroglios, but their name will be forever linked with the devastating opioid crisis that they knowingly unleashed on the world and it remains to be seen whether the current generation will have the knowhow to generate more wealth, or simply blow through what they have.
I most enjoyed the early parts of Empire of Pain: the story of two Eastern European Jewish immigrants who travelled to Brooklyn in pursuit of the American Dream and the work ethic that they instilled in their three sons; each of whom became a medical doctor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. The eldest, Arthur, was a polymath, aesthete, and the most striving of the brothers (he would pay for his own and his brothers’ educations with his side hustles while in med school himself) and it was Arthur who would come up with the idea of owning each arm of the octopus that is drugs manufacturing and marketing. As Radden Keefe writes, “They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.” And while this first generation of brothers wasn’t entirely likeable or honorable, they did seem to work quite hard and commit themselves to philanthropic acts (even if, as Arthur’s lawyer once explained, Philanthropy wasn’t charity. It was a business. It was all about the tax write offs, the purchase of prestige, and the Sackler name above the door.) When the narrative gets to the second generation — those who developed OxyContin and unleashed a massive salesforce to push it on initially reluctant prescribers — the Sacklers appear to have entirely lost their humanity in the pursuit of colossal wealth.
In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a pain-killer: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical.
The details of this story are maddening — the pill mills, the corruption at the FDA, backroom deals at the Justice Department — and if I had a complaint it would be that there are simply too many details. Radden Keefe quotes everyone from doormen to other journos and countless unnamed insiders; there is an entire chapter (in an already long book) about Richard Sackler’s college roommate (who would find the man who eventually became the main driver behind OxyContin’s marketing push to be unempathetic and out of touch). And if I had another complaint: The main defense that the Sacklers seem to offer is that they were small players in the opioid market (they claim a 4% market share; Radden Keefe says that calculated in a different way, they were closer to 30%), yet the thrust of this book is that this one family and their small pharmaceutical company are entirely responsible for the opioid crisis (including the ensuing rise in heroin and fentanyl abuse in America), and I don’t know if the author proved that to me. (The Sacklers’ other defense is that they can’t be responsible for how addictive types might abuse their otherwise valuable medication and that leads to the interesting question of whether opioid manufacturers should be treated like Big Tobacco [who knowingly marketed a lethal product and ended up paying the price] or like the Gun Lobby [who get away with insisting that responsibility for the use of guns is entirely in the hands of the user.] I honestly don’t know the answer, but it’s an interesting question.) As an investigative journalist, Radden Keefe has found a great hook with the Sackler family — the humble beginnings, the genius and quest for respectability of the founders, the greed of the next generation that led to the accumulation of billions and the disgrace of the family name — but I wish he added more perspective on how they fit into the bigger picture of a genuine health and social crisis. This is an exhaustive story of a family, but it didn’t feel like the whole story.
As they sought to hide from a historic crisis of their own creation, the Sacklers could sometimes seem like Pandora, gazing, slack-jawed, at the momentous downstream consequences of their own decisions. They told the world, and themselves, that the jar was full of blessings, that it was a gift from the gods. They opened it, and they were wrong.
I might come across as nitpicking but this is still a 4+ star read; Radden Keefe tells a fascinating story about an urgent topic, and while it might be a bit long, I was never bored. One thing for certain: Were the Sackler wealth not to pass the third generation, there would be few tears outside the family.
I think I’ll always have animals and I think I’ll always write about them. Their unknowability challenges me. Our affection for them intrigues me. I resist the urge to anthropomorphize them, but I do think they know something we don’t about living elementally. I’m happy to be in their company.
I really liked what I’ve previously read by Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief, The Library Book), but I guess what I liked most about those books were their format: the intertwined threads that weave together straight facts, singular events, and Orlean’s personal involvement with the material that synergise into something special. I came into On Animals expecting more of the same, and it’s not. Rather than plumbing the depths of one overarching story, this is a series of fifteen articles that Orlean published over the years (in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian Magazine) which all feature a lightweight look at some “animalish” topic. And taken one after another, this became a little repetitive and dull. I appreciate that Orlean has had a greater than average fascination with animals throughout her life, and that she has had the good fortune to travel the world as a journalist to investigate animal-related stories, but this collection didn’t add up to a satisfying book. Low three stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As Orlean explains in her introduction, she and her husband eventually left their Manhattan apartment for an acreage in upstate New York, which they then populated with chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea fowl, dogs, cats, and cattle. Despite having been raised in suburbia, Orlean took to farmlife and its duties, explaining that chicken-keeping seems to be enjoying a revival in the US:
Chickens seemed to go hand in glove with the postfeminist reclamation of other farmwife domestic arts — knitting, canning, quilting. Keeping chickens was a do-it-yourself hobby at a moment when doing things for yourself was newly appreciated as a declaration of self-sufficiency, a celebration of handwork, and a pushback from a numbing and disconnected big-box life.
And although she does reference the farm and her life there in some of the articles that follow, it doesn’t much serve as a true linking mechanism. The articles explore everything from show dogs to captive panda breeding, and most did have some interesting tidbits. In a story about a woman who hoarded tigers in deplorable conditions (long before anyone heard of the Tiger King), Orlean notes, “There are at least fifteen thousand pet tigers in the country — more than seven times the number of registered Irish setters or Dalmatians.” In an article on taxidermy — which didn’t much interest me overall — my attention was grabbed by, “One display, a coyote whose torso was split open to reveal a miniature scene of the destruction of the World Trade Center, complete with little firefighters and rubble piles, was surpassingly weird.” In an article on the historic treatment of animals used in Hollywood, Orlean quotes the (then) director of American Humane’s Film and Television Unit, Karen Rosa:
“If you show up on set with twenty-five thousand cockroaches, you better leave with twenty-five thousand cockroaches,” she said. I wondered if she extended the same welcome to cockroaches at home. She shook her head. “A cockroach in my kitchen is one thing,” she said. “A cockroach in a movie is an actor. Like any other actor, it deserves to go home at the end of the day.”
So, some of this was interesting and surprising, but as On Animals includes articles that go back to 1995, not all of the information is current. In an article on the use of oxen in Cuba, Orlean notes the friendship between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez that guaranteed Venezuelan oil would flow freely to supply the abundance of Soviet tractors employed by most Cuban farmers. And after relating the whole inspiring story of Keiko the killer whale (of Free Willy fame), Orlean notes that she was disappointed to have arrived in Iceland just a month after Keiko had been successfully released into the wild. Keiko had followed a wild pod of orcas to Norway and Orlean ends this article on swelling violins:
The children in Skaalvik Fjord who swam on his back and fed him fish reportedly found him delightful, as has everyone who has ever known Keiko. He played with them for a night and a day, the luckiest whale in the world, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
(It takes only a minute on a search engine to learn that Keiko didn’t thrive in the wild and his case makes the whole rewilding enterprise appear suspect; that seems the more interesting story, but it’s beyond the scope of this book.) So, there were some interesting nuggets along the way, but I had to slog through the dross to find them; I was never excited to make that effort.
To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy. Even poor old Sisyphus could figure that much out. And that’s saying something. You might say that God is an absurd concept but faith in God’s goodness. . . I find joy in that. I find it inspiring. Oba! I’m rambling. But I brought up Romeo and Juliet for a reason. What was it. . . yes! My town. . . my hometown, and your Mom’s too. Hooooooooo. And Momo’s, of course. . . it had a similar tragedy, in my opinion. The church. . . all those men, all those Willit Brauns. . . prevented us from. . . well no, it was more than that . . . they took something from us. They took it from us. They stole it from us. It was. . . our tragedy! Which is our humanity. We need those things. We need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need. . . not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative. . . to experience joy. To find joy and to create joy. All through the night. The fight night.
With Fight Night Miriam Toews returns to familiar themes of surviving (and escaping from) a fundamentalist Mennonite community (even if the M word isn’t specifically used this time), and the suicide of those who can’t find the will to go on. Unlike her earlier novels, however, this one has an absurdist tone, with three female generations of a family living together and exchanging frank and farcical barbs. The main character, nine-year-old Swiv, is constantly exasperated by her mother’s and grandmother’s seemingly unserious approach to life, but as the novel unspools, it’s obvious that this is a family filled with love, fighting to survive and find meaning in this irrational world. The tone is relentlessly comedic, but I was amused throughout and ultimately touched. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Why is Mom so weird? I asked Grandma. She had fallen asleep. Weird? she said, after a minute. She put on her glasses. Well, let’s see. Is it because of Gord? I asked her. No, no, said Grandma. Well, maybe. Her hormones might be out of whack but that’s not really why she’s weird, as you say. Gord makes her happy! Really? I said. Very happy, said Grandma. As do you. Grandma moved her hand over my hair. It got caught in a massive tangle and she laughed. She called the tangle an elflock. Your mom is fighting on every front, said Grandma. Internally, externally. Eternally, I said. Yes, it would seem so, said Grandma. With your dad being gone and —
After being suspended from school (for taking King of the Castle too seriously; she’s a fighter, too), Swiv needs to spend the days with her aged and ailing grandmother while her late-term pregnant mother attends rehearsals for a play she’s starring in. Grandma’s makeshift lessons aren’t exactly school board approved (Math class could be answering the question: If it takes five years to kill a guy with prayer, and it takes six people a day to pray, then how many prayers of pissed off women praying every day for five years does it take to pray a guy to death?), and based on a suggestion from a Family Therapist, Swiv’s main “assignment” (and the conceit of the novel) is to write a letter to her recently runaway father, telling him everything that’s happening in the family’s lives. They have Editorial Meetings (where Swiv assigns letters for her mother and grandmother to write, too), and between all the storytelling about the old country, their experiences in modern day Toronto, and a surprise trip to visit some American cousins, Toews is able to, once again, shine a light on her own Winnipeg Mennonite childhood without ever mentioning either (beyond one reference to the Disraeli Bridge). This does and doesn’t feel like familiar territory from Toews and I was bemused by the following quote (from the pregnant Mom’s letter to her unborn child, “Gord”):
I remember reading an interview with a writer once and she said that she was writing against death, that the act of writing, or of storytelling, that every time she wrote a story I mean, she was working through her own death. She didn’t care about impermanence. She didn’t care if anybody read her stories. She just wanted to write them down, to get them out of her.
(It’s no coincidence that the grandmother’s first name, Elvira, is the same as Toews’ own mother's, and in the Acknowledgements at the end, Toews thanks her “for teaching me, ceaselessly, when to fight and how to love.”) And again, the main difference between this novel and some of Toews' earlier work is the relentlessly absurdist tone. Swiv, who is just a little girl, often feels like she’s the only adult in her house; rolling her eyes at her mother’s and grandmother’s discussions about sex and other body functions; repeating profanities back to the older women and sighing if they object (“I don’t know why saying bowel movement and stool is better than vag and piehole. It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.”) The following is a pretty typical scene that captures the overall tone:
Mom did these stretching exercises while we walked. She called them lunges. She pushed against buildings and light-posts like she was trying to knock them over. She said she was doing it to strengthen her uterus and her vaginal wall, and because that’s what actors do. Do it with me, Swiv! No! I said. I don’t have all that shit. You don’t have a uterus and a vaginal wall? she asked me. I walked away while she was pushing as hard as she could against the corner of Nova Era bakery because I don’t want to just stand beside her while she does weird things like I’m in support of it. She was almost lying down, and taking up the whole sidewalk, and people had to go all the way around her.
I can imagine that this tone (and some of the frank talk and profanity) might be a turnoff to some readers but I think that Toews carries it off. There’s power in recognising the absurdity of life, and often, it’s from that recognition that we find the strength to fight. I'd expect to see this again at award season.
2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist:
As is true of most people, I imagine, I had experienced a number of turning points in my life, where I could go either left or right. And each time I chose one, right or left. (There were times when there was a clear-cut reason, but most of the time there wasn’t.) And it wasn’t always like I was making a choice, but more like the choice itself chose me. And now here I was, a first person singular. If I’d chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn’t be here. But still — who is that in the mirror?
(First Person Singular)
There’s something about a Haruki Murakami novel that can literally shake me to the core; I have a physical reaction to his surreal flights that feels like a reckoning. But, as I discovered with his last story collection (Men Without Women), Murakami’s short fiction just doesn’t engage me the same way. Even so, when I saw he had a new collection out this year — First Person Singular — I had to give him the benefit of the doubt...and once again...I was not shaken. I will always pick up Murakami, I was not exactly disappointed with this, but it was overall just okay.
In a recent interview with NPR, Murakami explains:
In this book, I wanted to try pursuing a “first person singular” format, but I don't like relating my experiences just the way they are. So I reshape them over and over and fictionalize them, to the point where, in some cases, you can't detect what they were modeled after. Through these steps, I gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the experience. Fiction writing is partly the process of clarifying what lies within you. There's a long tradition in modern Japanese literature of the autobiographical, so-called I-novel, the idea that sincerity lies in honestly and openly writing about your life, making a kind of self-confession. I'm opposed to that idea and wanted to create my own “first personal singular” writing.
And so, although I can’t have any idea to what extent these stories are based on actual events in Murakami’s life, I can say that they are all narrated in the first person singular, by what sounds like middle-aged, straight Japanese men who love jazz and baseball. (In The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection the narrator is a novelist identified as “Haruki Murakami”, but otherwise, the narrators are unnamed.) So, even though in one story (With The Beatles), the narrator complains about the kinds of “meaningless” questions that Literature classes ask about stories in the following way — With meaningless questions, it’s hard (or impossible) to determine logically if an answer is correct or not. I doubted whether even the authors of the selections themselves would have been able to decide. Things like “What can you glean from this passage about the writer’s stance toward war?” or “When the author describes the waxing and waning of the moon, what sort of symbolic effect is created?” You could give almost any answer. If you said that the description of the waxing and waning of the moon was simply a description of the waxing and waning of the moon, and created no symbolic effect, no one could say with certainty that your answer was wrong. Of course there was a relatively reasonable answer, but I didn’t really think that arriving at a relatively reasonable answer was one of the goals of studying literature. — I will take that as a warning from the author and still make a stab at interpreting what these stories aimed to achieve.
As stated, each of the eight stories is narrated in the first person singular and most of them open with a line like “So I’m telling a younger friend of mine about a strange incident that took place back when I was eighteen.” or “I’d like to tell a story about a woman.” These have the structure and feeling of memories related, and with only a couple of exceptions (an impossible LP found in a record shop, the return of a talking monkey, walking out of a bar into a surreal landscape), these, for the most part, read like straightforward memories of a middle-aged, straight Japanese man. Most of these stories involve remembrances of youthful love affairs, and mostly, they are interesting, self-deprecating, and relatable. On the other hand, it is often said of Murakami that his obsession with young girls (understandable when he was a young writer but growing ever creepier as he ages) is a turnoff for female readers, and indeed, I’ve read several reviews where female readers say they closed this book when they got to the opening of Carnaval, where the narrator begins with: “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest.” Women are certainly objectified in these stories — they also commit suicide, have their names “stolen”, and are used solely for meaningless sex without any protection from the narrators who relate their stories — and in the final, titular, story, the narrator is confronted in a bar by a strange woman who tells him “You should be ashamed of yourself.” The narrator of that story had apparently wronged a mutual female acquaintance a few months prior, and as angry as his accuser is, the man honestly has no idea what he might have done wrong. All of this to say: In the era of MeToo and the patriarchy being forced to confront their privilege and the demeaning power of the male gaze, is Murakami acknowledging the fact that he may have unwittingly wronged the fairer sex over the course of his career and ought to be ashamed of himself? That’s all I’ve got and who can say with certainty that my interpretation is wrong?
A few quotes I found striking, beginning with one from On a Stone Pillow
”Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,” she said, in a flat tone, like she was reciting something written on a wall.
From With The Beatles
What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve gotten older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without me realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty girls, the vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting — sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
From Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey (Corny but made me smile.)
”How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.
“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. My voice sounded almost mythological. It didn’t sound like it came from me, but rather like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was...hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why is he speaking in a human language?
And this from Carnaval demonstrates a lovely ending (but I want to add that most stories weren’t tied up quite so neatly).
These were both nothing more than a pair of minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Short side trips along the way. Even if they hadn’t happened, I doubt my life would have wound up much different from what it is now. But still, these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. And when they do, their unexpected power shakes me to the core. Like an autumn wind that gusts at night, swirling fallen leaves in a forest, flattening the pampas grass in fields, and pounding hard on the doors to people’s homes, over and over again.
Short stories are dangerous: tiny sparks of pure narrative fire that burn hotter because they snuff out sooner. Small, self-contained adventures gave me the freedom to fail — to push my limits, to experiment with styles and ideas that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. And fail I did, over and over. I wrote scores of short pieces before I managed to turn out one that fired on all cylinders. The wonderful thing is, if you blow it with something short, you’ve only wasted a week or three of writing time. And if someone reads your story in a magazine and hates it, there’ll be another story, by another author, on the next page.
Even Greater Mistakes is a collection of nineteen short stories by Charlie Jane Anders; mostly sci-fi and fantasy, mostly set in space or a near-future/post-apocalyptic Earth. As the author notes in an intro, this collection spans her entire career, and as she was encouraged to “showcase the full range of (her) writing”, this is a real mixed bag: as a consequence, there were a few misses for me, but many more hits. Anders can swerve from angrily political to gonzo comedy, and consistently, display a lot of heart and relatable human characters (even if those humans are engineered or cat-shaped or zombie vampires). Throughout, people are having uninhibited sex, making meaningful art, and trying to find where they belong in the world (the answer usually being: San Francisco). This was quite a long and varied read and I’d expect there would be something for most everyone in it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Anders helpfully introduces each story (explaining its inspiration or process; adding content warnings where appropriate), and as an example of something I found interesting, she noted that If You Take My Meaning is a sort of sequel to the novel The City in the Middle of the Night; and although I hadn’t read that book, it wasn’t necessary to have found the short story moving and meaningful (I could feel that these characters had a complete back story, even if I didn’t know it.) On the other hand, I learned that the story Clover was written as a followup to the novel All the Birds in the Sky (which I have read, and loved), but I didn’t get much out of that story; hit and miss. Move on. I loved the concept behind Six Months, Three Days: A woman who can see every possible future for herself (and who spends her life arranging things to her best advantage) is finally about to have her first date (which she has anticipated her entire life) with the only other clairvoyant on Earth — a man who can only see the actual future that will occur. They both know that they are about to experience the happiest days of their lives and that the affair will end terribly: what does this say about free will and the power of love? From the story:
“I don’t think you’re any more or less powerful than me. Our powers are just different,” Doug says. “But I think you’re a selfish person. I think you’re used to the idea that you can cheat on everything, and it’s made your soul a little bit rotten. I think you’re going to hate me for the next few weeks until you figure out how to cast me out. I think I love you more than my own arms and legs and I would shorten my already short life by a decade to have you stick around one more year. I think you’re brave as hell for keeping your head up on our journey together into the mouth of hell. I think you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you have a good heart despite how much you’re going to tear me to shreds.”
When I was reading Love Might be Too Strong a Word (about a spaceship manned by a variety of specially-bred humanoids), I couldn’t decide how I felt about the main character’s use of confusing pronouns. Mab uses “be and ber” when referring to Dot the pilot (“I came up with the correct pronoun by instinct, even before my mind took in the fact that a pilot was touching my hand”), “yr and ym” when referencing their roommate Idra, and I couldn’t decide if that was really inventive or an unnecessary barrier to my own understanding. When I asked Kennedy what she thought, she said that was the coolest thing she ever heard: Why should nonfamiliar characters, who don’t even have human genitals, need to be divided only into standard males/females? And especially in the realm of scifi — where geeks and nerds turn for belonging — why not be ultimately inclusive? When she put it like that, my own understanding was expanded, and I have to thank Anders for that. (As a trans author, Anders goes on to explore more ideas regarding gender and invents more pronouns in these stories, and if someone is looking for a truly horrifying story that goes a long way towards explaining why these ideas are important, Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue is about a stomach-churning “conversion therapy” for trans folks.) From Love Might be Too Strong a Word:
“I can’t stand it among the other pilots anymore, or any of the upper dars. The spirers with all those fingers, with their base-twenty-seven cleverness. The breeders, tending those breedpods as if they’re going to amount to something. It all makes me feel so hopeless. But when I’m with you, it’s different. I feel alive. Like life is worth something after all.”
Anders introduces Rock Manning Goes for Broke as “a meditation on violence, slapstick comedy, and the relationship between the two. The part of us that lets us laugh at someone else’s pratfall might also be what allows us to tolerate horrific violence against people who aren’t part of our in-group.” (The exploration of societal ills through niche artforms comes up again with the use of standup comedy in Ghost Champagne and mural painting in My Breath is a Rudder) A group of outlandish antifascist filmmakers find themselves even more popular after some kind of pressure bomb destroys everyone’s hearing:
Sneaking up on people was suddenly way easier — but so was getting snuck up on. The fear of somebody creeping up behind me and cutting my throat was the only thing that kept me from being bored all the time. I always thought noise was boring, but silence bored me even worse. If you walked up behind someone, especially a member of the red bandana militia who were keeping order on our streets, you had to be very careful how you caught their attention. You did not want a red bandana to think you were sneaking up on them.
And I was really intrigued by the concept of Captain Roger in Heaven: As Anders writes, “Marith didn’t mean to start a sex cult, she just wanted to feel sexy for once.” But Marith does start a sex cult (attributing all of the esoteric teachings to some absent guru) in order to combat loneliness, and once her group gets large enough to attract Christian protestors, they are required by law to own a “Visualizer”; a device that will show where any given person is spending their afterlife. When a member of the cult dies and ends up in a fiery hell, the rest of the group scrambles to invent an afterlife worth living for:
The longer he stared, the more it seemed to Leon that the Christians were generating their afterlife, focusing psychic energy so that they made a stable conduit and created something on the other side of it. They were almost writing lines of code in the fabric of reality.
Again, there’s a lot of variety in this collection — not everything worked for me — but it’s overall smart and heartfelt and relatable. I need to remember to read more of Anders’ novels.
All the talk about misfortune plaguing certain estates and families. . .I’m willing to accept it may have been true in heathen times. But you are surely wise enough to place your life and fate in the hands of God the Almighty and not believe such things. May God have mercy on you, my Olav. I wish you both happiness and bliss in your marriage. And may your lineage be known as fortunate men from now on!
The second volume in Sigrid Undset’s Olav Audunssøn series, Providence shows how the title character suffers the consequences of his unrepented actions from the first volume, Vows; and suffer he does (“Providence” is an appropriate title for the theme of this volume [and is a direct translation of Undset’s original] but I find it interesting that the first translation into English in 1925 named this novel “The Snake Pit”; also metaphorically appropriate, if melodramatic). Once again, Unset’s writing is immersively informative on time and place (Thirteenth Century Norway on the Oslo Fjord) without being didactic, and the pressures she puts her characters under allow for an organic exploration of the laws and customs of the day. As a middle volume (there are four in this series), I didn’t find Providence to be quite as fascinating as the premise-building in Vows — and as most of the struggle in this book is between Olav and his conscience, there is a corresponding drop in action — but I still enjoyed this very much and am looking forward to the next in the series; I’m rounding down to three stars only in comparison to Vows. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Spoilers from here on.)
By now he’d given so much thought to every aspect of the matter that he could hardly remember anymore what he was thinking when he chose to remain silent and erase all trace of the deed, but he’d fooled himself into believing that the shame could be concealed. No one must know that he had gotten rid of Teit Hallssøn; then no one would find out that Ingunn had been disgraced by Teit. It seemed to Olav incomprehensible that he could have imagined anything so utterly foolhardy.
Providence picks up where Vows ended: After killing the man, in self defense, who raped Ingunn (his betrothed since childhood), Olav Audunssøn returns to his “allodial estate” of Hestviken to become its new Master. When Olav goes to retrieve Ingunn from where she had been staying with kinfolk, he learns that she had given birth to a son by her rapist and had sent the boy off to live with a foster family. Although these events had brought Ingunn much shame up in the north, Olav was able to offer her a fresh start as the Mistress of Hestviken, where no one knew of the unwed pregnancy or the “wayside bastard” that resulted. The pair is young, beautiful, finally living together as they had expected to their entire lives, and although their future seems assured of happiness, the past insists on holding them back. Anxious to continue the family line (of which Olav himself is the last living member), Ingunn suffers a series of stillbirths and miscarriages, and when Olav realises that Ingunn is pining for her missing son, he retrieves the boy and claims him as his own. Olav eventually believes that because he had killed the rapist Teit without making a confession to the priest (and risking the priest forcing him to make a public confession as well and opening himself up to legal repercussions), God was punishing him. But when Olav suggests to Ingunn that he should finally clear his conscience, the weak and wasted woman fears what consequences would befall her and her son Eirik if her husband were jailed or exiled; Ingunn makes Olav promise to never make that confession and he agrees to live with a burdened soul, watching his beloved wife slowly fade away.
It felt like he was swimming with a drowning companion clinging to his neck, and to be deemed worthy of calling himself a man, he would either have to save the other person or drown as well. Yet it was possible to feel a certain failure of courage at the thought that the end was inevitable; he would be dragged under, no matter how hard he strove to do his utmost, because a man could do no less.
While most of the action in this book takes place at Hestviken — and most of that inside the smoke-filled, sparsely-furnished main hall that served as the living quarters for this rich family of landowners — there are a few scenes of Olav fulfilling his duty to join in a leiðangr against the Danes; much history and social custom was relayed in this way, but I wish there had been a bit more about the supernatural beliefs of the people: the nøkk, the hulder, Ættarfylgja (Olav’s axe that sang before a killing), the ghost story that Olav’s aged kinsman Olav Ingolfssøn told about how he ruined his leg and which had caused another relative, Dirt Beard, to go mad. For the most part, however, the characters are trying to forget their pagan pasts and follow the teachings of the Church; and it is the disconnect between Olav’s religious beliefs and the accepted code of honour of the community that causes him so much unhappiness (that and his beloved wife wasting away in her bed with frequent bouts of diarrhea and suppurating bedsores). I am very much looking forward to the third volume (Crossroads) and hope that poor Olav finds some happiness there.
