In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

 

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

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

Pain and Pen

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

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

Aquamarine

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

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

Histories, I

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

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

Dante’s Rib

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

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

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

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea of Tranquility

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stray Dogs: And Other Stories

 

When his father’s family had left their village in Palestine, the last thing his father had ever seen of that place was the road leading back to his house and a few stray dogs. We left, his father said, but the dogs stayed. And his father had looked behind at those strays and laughed. ~Stray Dogs

Peopled with countless expats (mostly from the Middle East; mostly working as photographers or academics; mostly living in Montreal), Stray Dogs is a collection of eleven short stories that I would categorise as slices of life. I’ve read, and for the most part loved, each of Rawi Hage’s novels, and while his writing at the sentence level in the short form is still of the highest quality, these stories (with the exception of maybe one or two) are missing that frisson of urgency or swerve that I so love in the work of my favourite short story writers (like Alice Munro or George Saunders). Interesting as slices of life, not quite to my personal taste for the format. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The Iconoclast

After reflecting on this for a while, I concluded that while my work was indeed about ephemerality, it was not about the ephemerality of the self. Rather, it examined the ephemerality of the image of the self. Every hybrid was a partial death, an incomplete acquisition of the original.

A Lebanese academic who studies how photographic images appear in literature is challenged on the authenticity of his identity by a local while on a writing residency in Berlin.

Bird Nation

Lebanon’s renowned cuisine could well be considered one of the most diverse and healthy in the world. Well, without the wheat factor, of course. Wheat, or more precisely bread, is the country’s misdemeanour, perhaps even its unappreciated tragedy, alongside its unbearable rulers, noise, corruption, the constant threat of war and its mad traffic. It did not have to be this way.

An ironic, and ultimately fabulist, take on the condition of the modern Lebanese citizen. (One of my favourites in the collection, for the tone.)

Stray Dogs

In the car, she told Samir that his analysis of photography and Islam, a religion that forbade representation, could well be as offensive as his attempt to connect the meaning of Japanese photography to the ancient religion of Japan. If what you propose is true, then all meaning comes from history, and therefore our attempts to overcome the historical and social in our art have failed, and everything remains stagnant. Maybe in the Arab world that is the case, she added, but not in Japan.

In a family that might be considered “stray dogs” themselves (refugees from Palestine to Jordan, the father commutes to Saudi Arabia for work and the son now lives in Minnesota), a young academic — whose Philosophy thesis was written on photography — challenges his father’s, and the art world’s, orthodoxy.

Mother, Mother, Mother

Mother, Mother, Mother, I shouted as I banged at my parents’ bedroom door. She opened it wearing a flimsy, transparent robe that barely covered her thighs. My father lay under the quilt. I stood at the door and neither of my parents said a word. My mother did not go back to bed, and my father lit a cigarette, his lips transforming into a fuming locomotive hauling a chain of silent wagons, sliding doors open.

When an expat man learns that his mother back in Beirut has died, his memories of their family’s relationships unspool in unpredictable ways. Set against the backdrop of war, the story of this one family reveals quite a lot about the Lebanese experience.

The Whistle

When I was sixteen, I convinced my cousin to chase falling bombs in the streets of Beirut with me. The objective was to get a photograph of a bomb before it reached the ground or landed on a building, on a car, on a street — before it caused death and mayhem. The camera was his, but we shared its use. The car we drove in pursuit of falling bombs was my father’s. Our attempts to capture these images never produced anything. We sent the film off for development, but all we got back were photographs of blue skies, clouds, roads and the tops of buildings. The decisive moment — to use Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous expression — was not determined by our visual anticipation of what would come into the frame of the camera; our moment was decided by the sound of the bomb’s whistle. My cousin and I stood on highways, or in alleys between buildings, aiming our lens towards the trajectory of whistles.

After taking a trip to Beirut and spending time with the cousin he hung out with as a kid, a Montreal-based man becomes depressed. While discussing it with a friend (a fellow former art student with whom he can knowingly agree “all photography is about death”), the surprising heart of the matter becomes clear.

The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse

Giuseppe stole a glance at the painting of the horse behind him and then at the man upon the horse. He hurriedly left the church by the back alley that led to his apartment. Perhaps one of his mother’s mysteries was in the process of explaining itself.

An unsuccessful Montreal photographer has his luck, and self-image, change after an unexpected visit from Sophia Loren.

Instructions for the Dance

He was known as the dancing photographer — although some thoughtlessly called him the Monkey for his camera antics, his shrill screams of “Smile !”, his endless clicking, clicking. And soon the owner of the studio, Mike Gold, was less in demand than his assistant.

Another story that seems to be about an expat Montreal-based wedding photographer, but as Anatol fled Communist Poland in his youth, this is really a story about what happens when he tries to go home again.

The Veil

I thought of Zahra. I thought of my son, and then I thought of my existence. I passed the days that followed in fasting and prayer. No veil shall obstruct your light. I repeated this chant until the veil dropped and you were revealed to me.

A British-educated Iraqi professor is brought to a secret location to help with some translations, and as he finds himself caught between East and West, between the reality of his country’s present and his personal past, he finds comfort in the lifting of the veil between himself and God.

The Duplicates

He was a master of analog photography and in private would often theorize on the role theology and the Enlightenment had played in the evolution of the medium. Al Awad believed that humans’ obsession with the passage of time, our insistence that existence must mean something, was merely an attempt to preserve an image of our fleeting reality.

Another Montreal photographer (this time an archivist at McGill), Basilidis Al Awad has his personal philosophies about the artistic value of photographic negatives challenged when working with a rare manuscript on loan from the Vatican.

The Wave

There is a disaster coming, and for the past twenty years I’ve been warning the authorities about it. No one believes me — but it will happen. It will happen tomorrow, July 9. The first tidal wave will hit the shore at 3: 45 p.m. sharp. The location? The Beirut shore. The tidal wave will decimate my place of birth, and I am excited to watch it happen.

A crockpot ex-professor of Geology (born in Beirut, educated in Calgary, working in Montreal) foresees the destruction of his birth city, but it might have more to do with wish fulfillment than science.

The Colour of Trees

The universe before his eyes, beautiful and wondrous as it was, did nothing to convince him that there was anything to discover beyond the self, the inner world that limited our relations with the outside world. How destructive and alienating, he thought, was that dialectical relation between the inner world of the self and the outer self of the world. Perhaps this was what lay at the heart of his decision to retreat to such a remote place. The best the outside world could offer the professor was the spectacle of a few changes and fleeting colours.

When a Philosophy professor retires to his dead wife’s rural cottage, a tragedy provokes an obsession with Heidegger in the professor (concerning the tyranny of technology and the aesthetic decline from a Michelangelo self-portrait to a modern cliffside cellphone selfie). This was probably my favourite in the collection; a really strong note upon which to end.

Around the World in 80 Books

 

Drawing on my experiences abroad, I decided to loosely mimic Phileas Fogg’s route from London eastward through Asia, across the Pacific to the Americas, and finally back to London. I would recall, and often actually revisit, a group of particularly memorable locations and the books I associate with them, both to see how literature enters the world and to think about how the world bleeds into literature. In January of 2020, I was plotting my itinerary, building it around upcoming talks and conferences. Then came Covid-19.

David Damrosch (chair of Harvard University's department of comparative literature) has built a career on introducing (sometimes even translating) non-English texts into the Western canon. Planning a series of literary talks around the world for 2020, Damrosch thought he might visit a globe-encircling series of cities that mimicked Phileas Fogg’s imaginary eighty day journey and write a book about those experiences that could further “introduce a broader readership to the expansive landscape of literature today”; but then Covid hit and the world shut down and Damrosch’s project was iced. Until, that is, he decided to host his tour online — taking inspiration from Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (a fanciful “Grand Tour” of the chambers of an aristocrat who found himself under house arrest in 1790) — with house-bound Damrosch exploring an exotic locale through five books per week, covering eighty diverse books over his sixteen week project. This book is the result of that project.

Starting with novels (and some poetry collections) set in London (mimicking Phileas Fogg’s launching point), Damrosch then voyages out to Paris (discussing Proust to Perec), Kraków (Primo Levi and Franz Kafka to Olga Tokarczuk), Venice, the Middle East, Africa, Israel and Palestine, Tehran, India, China, Japan, South and Central America, Caribbean Islands and an island off the coast of Maine (which was the childhood home of the author; surprisingly more literary than one might anticipate), New York City and back to London (with a special look at Tolkein). Much of the familiar Western canon is referenced throughout — books such as In Search of Lost Time, The Odyssey, and Candide have been reframed countless times by a diverse range of authors through time and space; every memory-inducing bite of rice cracker is a Proustian moment — and Damrosch masterfully uses the familiar to not only demonstrate how world literature has responded to the West, but also to underline how they have developed independent canons of their own. Around the World in 80 Books is quite long , and sometimes dense, but I found it consistently fascinating (and I will say that I imagine it would be infinitely more interesting to actually take a course in Comparative Literature from Damrosch) and it gave me much inspiration for further reading. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It would be impossible to go over all eighty (one) of Damrosch’s selections (and countless other references), but to give a sense of how he links things together: Beginning in London, Damrosch notes that the city is well (if very differently) described by authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He points out that Woolf didn’t think much of those other two writers (she wrote a famously damning essay on David Copperfield and once wrote of Sherlock Holmes’ beloved sidekick, “to me Dr. Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun”). Damrosch further writes of the complexity that Woolf brings to her title character in Mrs. Dalloway: “Devising her own version of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique, and like him adapting the ancient Greek unities of time and place for her novel, Woolf draws on Sophocles and Euripides as well as on Chekhov, Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust.” (This kind of intertextuality is frequently, exhaustively, noted.) When Damrosch’s imaginary travels take him to India, he begins with an analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, writing, “Kipling can be said to have invented India for many foreign readers, much as Oscar Wilde thought that Dickens and Turner had invented London.” Part of this analysis is a thorough introduction to Kipling’s Indian character Hurree Chunder Mookerjee (an employee of the colonial government and an agent in the “Great Game” of espionage), and this becomes vital later when Damrosch introduces us to novelist Jamyang Norbu’s most famous work (which sees a resurrected Sherlock Holmes and Hurree Chunder Mookerjee collaborating on a case in the Himalayas):

Grounded in Norbu’s creative rereading of Kipling and Conan Doyle, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes blends genre fiction and political advocacy in a mode of metafictional play, in which Tibetan Buddhism is shown to be a moral resource for the whole world, transcending greed and the quest for domination, in an ideal blend of religion and science, ancient and modern, East and West together. The book has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Hungarian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

(I particularly liked the fact that Holmes’ discovery of Buddhism helps him kick his drug addiction.) Many sections play out like this: Damrosch acknowledges that a European first introduced Western readers to a foreign land (as did Kipling for India or Marco Polo for China), then discusses authors (like Salman Rushdie or Norbu) who have written as emigres or exiles about their homelands, and then concludes with a modern author (in this case, Jhumpa Lahiri) who writes for a modern audience at a generational remove from the locale. This feels balanced (acknowledging the initial Westernised view of a location and then including the voices of the locals) and feels like it is giving equal say to two sides of a global conversation. One more example of the depth of intertextuality to be found in this book:

Writers such as (Derek) Walcott, James Joyce, and Jean Rhys, who all grew up on colonized islands, can feel the need to invent a language suited to their island’s modest material circumstances, intense localism, and distance from the metropolitan centers of politics, history, and culture. Island-based writers often orient themselves in the world with reference to other islands, near or far. In this chapter, we’ll proceed from Walcott to two of his inspirations, Joyce and Rhys, and then to Margaret Atwood’s feminist rewriting of Joyce’s rewriting of Homer, and finally to Judith Schalansky’s mapping of remote islands around the world.

And I’ll end with Damrosch’s own conclusion; on the absolute necessity of reading widely in world literature:

Jules Verne didn’t content himself with sending his heroes around the world in eighty days, but also propelled them to the moon and immersed them 20,000 leagues under the sea. In antiquity, restless Odysseus was said to have left Ithaca late in life, not for another sea voyage but for its opposite, a journey on land until he’d find a place where people wouldn’t know what an oar was used for. The list of new literary destinations is endless. With the world falling apart in so many ways, and the pandemic’s aftershocks likely to long remain with us, it’s good to connect in the ways we can, over the things that matter to all of us, as we tend our gardens and perform le tour du monde dans nos chambres.

 

What Strange Paradise

 

As she watches (the sunhead swifts) flying up over the eastern cliffs this morning, they break into strange new formations, asymmetrical and chaotic. All but a handful turn in one direction, a trickle dissents, and then a fault line runs jagged through the heart of the flock like a landmass coming undone. Something about the island is changing, she thinks, and the birds are the first to feel it.

 

Winner of the 2021 Giller Prize — Canada’s “richest” literary award — What Strange Paradise is an empathetically written account of one nine year old Syrian boy’s journey as an unwilling refugee. Separated into alternating “Before” and “After” chapters, we learn how Amir ended up on a decrepit boat crossing the Mediterranean (and follow the frightful voyage he took with a varied cast of other desperate people) and watch as a local girl tries to help the foreign boy who washed up on her home island’s shore (all while keeping one step ahead of the military forces looking for Amir). I say this is “empathetically” written because author Omar El Akkad gives voice to every possible point of view (from cosmopolitan Syrians who believe that reports of razed villages are “fake news”, to the human smugglers who justify their efforts to make their own way in the world, to the Greek colonel who believes that the boatloads of refugees are an attempt at back door colonisation), and despite acknowledging all of the arguments against refugees taking this most desperate leap into the unknown, El Akkad never lets the reader forget that little boys do wash up on foreign shores and they deserve to be treated with kindness and humanity. How do we keep forgetting that in the debate over “what should be done”? With truly crisp, thoughtful, and balanced writing, I think this is a thoroughly worthy and timely Giller winner.

Once, years earlier, Amir’s father told him that none of this started with bombs or bullets or a few stupid kids spray-painting the slogans of the revolution on the walls. It started with a drought. You come from farmers, he said, and five years before you were born the earth turned on us, the earth withheld. We are the products of that withholding. Every man you ever meet is nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed. Don’t call this a conflict, Amir’s father said. There’s no such thing as conflict. There’s only scarcity, there’s only need.

This is a rather short read, but with characters organically stating profound truths, it has both heft and nuance. And with the storyline split the way it is — getting to know Amir through the before chapters, and following along with his flight for freedom in the after — there’s an earned tension to the plot; you eventually identify with Amir and want what he wants. Along the way we meet tourists who are put out that corpses washing up have closed the beach at their resort for the day, we meet right wing politicians who want to know why these “so-called refugees” all seem to have cell phones, we meet desperate people fleeing desperate circumstances who believe that just reaching the West will equal safety, and we meet the clear-eyed pragmatists who would disabuse them of that notion:

The West you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad — they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.

I agree with other readers that the final chapter (“Now”) seems to undermine the essence of this book, but in this interview, El Akkad explains what’s happening there and it serves to remind me how cosy and removed from the refugee experience I am. Once again, I’ll call this a compelling read and a very worthy winner.

2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist:

• What Strange Paradise  by Omar El Akkad  * Winner
• The Listeners by Jordan Tannahill 
• Fight Night by Miriam Toews
• Glorious Frazzled Beings by Angélique Lalonde
• The Son of The House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia 

The Listeners

 

Tom, the Earth is making us aware of itself in the most extraordinary way. And you can choose to listen or can choose not to. But I am listening. Because I have been given the gift of being able to. And so have you.

The first line of Jordan Tannahill’s Giller Prize-nominated The Listeners is: The chances are that you have, at some point, stumbled upon the viral meme of me screaming naked in front of a bank of news cameras, and if nothing else, learning what brings a suburban wife/mother/English teacher to the point of screaming naked in public was an intriguing hook that kept me turning the pages. Along the way, this gets deeply philosophical about our times — about the conflict between belief and disbelief as it concerns faith, women’s health, conspiracy theories, etc. — and Tannahill makes this equally entertaining and thought-provoking. I like reading fiction in an attempt to learn about how others live, and if I have a complaint here, it’s that Tannahill writes from the POV of an American woman (when he is neither American nor a woman; this is Tannahill’s imagined narrative of how such a person lives), but as I can understand that his particular plot would be experienced most intensely by this particular American woman (at least as how I imagine that woman’s life to be), this perspective was only mildly distracting to me. An overall fine read, rounded up to four stars.

The thing I still struggle to wrap my head around is how did something so small, so innocuous precipitate the complete unravelling of my life. How all of this soul-searching, transcendence, and devastation could begin with a low and barely perceptible sound.

One night, as she was getting ready to fall asleep, forty-year-old Claire Devon first heard The Hum; a super low frequency, diffuse droning that seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. No one else in her circle of family or friends can hear it, and as Claire becomes sleep-deprived and made to feel a bit crazy, she is relieved when first a student in her class and then a neighbourhood group come forward as people who can also hear The Hum. Despite knowing how dangerous it is to be seen fraternising with a student outside of class (not to mention texting and offering consoling hugs), Claire can’t help but join seventeen-year-old Luke in his efforts to track down the source of the noise; and when they discover the neighbourhood group and joining it causes estrangement from their families, the reader has to wonder: at what point does a group of people, sleep-deprived and isolated, joining together to seek transcendence, cease to be a support group and becomes a cult? The choices that Claire makes along the way are credible for her character, but like when you’re watching a horror movie, you can’t help but repeatedly shout out, “No! Why are you doing that?!”

Until that evening and my conversation with Ashley on the staircase, I don’t think I fully grasped the extent to which hysteria was a psychic wound that we as women still bore; a wound inflicted from centuries of our symptoms, our instincts about our own bodies, our pleasures and afflictions, always being the first to be discounted and discredited, even by other women. Even by our own daughters, as the case may be. It was a wound that we still carried, because we could, at any moment, have an entire history called upon to silence us in a word, in an instant.

The Listeners is, at heart, a piece of Millennial feminist fiction. When Claire first hears The Hum, her husband wants to be supportive, but eventually pressures her to seek help; to medicate and get therapy. Claire makes a point of telling us that she became an English teacher in order to counter the patriarchal, homophobic, white male literary canon that’s taught to high school students. She tells us that she was a polyamorous riot grrrl before she met her husband; she’s sex positive enough to have given her daughter a vibrator for her fourteenth birthday; when she first meets the others in the neighbourhood group, she fields “some pretty strong toxic masculinity vibes” from one guy, an aging couple were “definitely a bit OK Boomer”. In this first meeting, it’s noted that the men are dominating the conversation (a retired academic mansplains what he thinks is causing the noise, the old man wants to write cranky letters to the city, the ex-military guy wants to talk Deep State), whereas the women are relieved to finally have others to talk to about their personal experiences (they are listeners). When Claire is alone at home one night and thinks a stranger is in her yard, she tells us, “I don’t think anyone who isn’t a woman living on her own can fully appreciate the amount of time we spend imagining and fearing this exact scenario.” And again, as Tannahill isn’t “a woman living on her own”, I was brought out of the story by him telling me this; by his telling me what it’s like to be a woman going through this entire experience.

But this is about more than feminism. In an early scene, we learn that Claire is a staunch atheist, pleased to have saved her husband from his fundamentalist Christian upbringing, but Paul finds himself, in middle age, being drawn back to the faith of his youth. When Claire, with her group, discovers a way of tuning into The Hum, of finding a way to transcend reality in a way that hints at something more than base materialism, she finds herself intensely challenged; apparently losing one’s disbelief can be as traumatic as losing one’s faith. And the ex-military man introduces some credible conspiracy theories about what could be causing The Hum: if the Deep State isn’t actually causing it, you can be sure they know about it and are monitoring this group (the government are also listeners). As this story is set in Texas (at least I think it is, Paul is from Amarillo), I was put in mind of Waco and the Branch Davidians; and we know how that ended. In Tannahill’s last novel, what I would call the underrated Liminal, he wrote:

And it's of course considered obscene, to transcend our bodies — whether through sex, drugs, or a suicide belt. For the self to consciously cleave itself apart from the body. There's a horror in having agency in the act. It destabilizes that which is thought to be fixed: that only God or the universe or fate can unfix these two parts of our being. That sacred union. Our body, the temple. And in that moment I understood “sacred” as belonging to a language of limits, a word which demarcated boundaries we were not prepared to cross for fear of destabilizing the accepted order, for fear of realizing how far our bodies could actually stretch, transform, how much pleasure they could hold, how extreme they could be made, how fluid and porous they really were, because to realize those potentials might have meant remaking all the containers — physical, social, political –— that held the world in place.

The Listeners would appear to be another way of examining this same theme, but more rooted in reality than Liminal was. And for the questions it raises and explores, I found this to be a totally worthwhile read.

2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist:

• What Strange Paradise  by Omar El Akkad  * Winner
• The Listeners by Jordan Tannahill 
• Fight Night by Miriam Toews
• Glorious Frazzled Beings by Angélique Lalonde
• The Son of The House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia