This was insomniac memory, not a dream. It was the piano lesson again — an orange-tiled floor, one high window, a new upright in a bare room close to the sickbay. He was eleven years old, attempting what others might know as Bach’s first prelude from Book One of The Well-tempered Clavier, simplified version, but he knew nothing of that. He didn’t wonder whether it was famous or obscure. It had no when or where. He could not conceive that someone had once troubled to write it. The music was simply here, a school thing, or dark, like a pine forest in winter, exclusive to him, his private labyrinth of cold sorrow. It would never let him leave.
Lessons is an epic of the British white male Baby Boomer experience, from a postwar military base-hopping childhood to solitary COVID-19 lockdowns in old age. The protagonist Roland Baines — for whom author Ian McEwan admits he “raided bits of (his) own life” for the first time — is a bit of a loser in middle age as the novel opens (his wife has just left him and their infant son; Roland can’t commit to a career beyond a bit of lounge piano playing here, some tennis lessons or freelance journalism there), but as he considers his life and we get to revisit his childhood (and watch him age), it becomes clear that some early trauma “rewired” him for life, setting Roland drifting helplessly against the great tides of historical events. This is a very British novel — from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Brexit, Roland and his friends discuss world events through the lens of their party politics — but Roland himself is a very relatable and sympathetic character: the good-hearted, rational everyman who witnesses and comments on the big and small events of his generation. From the big look at history to the details of Roland’s own journey through it, this is a masterful and valuable novel; perhaps the lasting word on this particular type of (the British white male of a certain class) Boomer experience. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The past, the modern past, was a weight, a burden of piled rubble, forgotten grief. But the weight on him was at one remove. It barely weighed at all. The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell — a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife — was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.
There’s too much in Lessons to go over the details, but I did particularly like that Roland’s wife left him to become an award-winning novelist. Roland himself (an autodidact who left school at sixteen but filled his adulthood with improving reads) at one point expresses an impatience for the novelists of his time (They busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic depictions of class difference. In their lightweight tales, the greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair, or a divorce. None but a very few seemed much bothered by poverty, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust or the future of humankind or even the shrinking beauty of the countryside under the onslaught of modern farming.) But eventually, Roland became “more generous” and “less stupid” in his estimation of these writers (A tweed jacket never stopped anyone from writing well. He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement.) Between this evolution of thought and Roland’s perceptive readings of his ex-wife’s work, it felt like McEwan was giving an insider’s view of the novelist’s art, and perhaps, the evolution of his own estimation of his peers’ work. And I liked all of those bits very much.
The vile childhoods of others were not only a comfort to many but a means of emotional exploration, and an expression of what everyone knew but needed to keep on hearing: our beginnings shape us and must be faced.
Much is made of various characters’ childhoods and the trauma they suffered there (in particular, Roland was “rewired” by circumstances related to his piano lessons: all of his life unspools inevitably from this point), but the title also refers to the bigger events of history and what lessons we ought to, but often fail, to collectively learn from them:
By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol? He had thought 1989 was a portal, a wide opening to the future, with everyone streaming through. It was merely a peak. Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years. Or a portal to a new kind of America, the present administration just an interregnum, a variant of Weimar. Meet me on the Avenue of the Heroes of January Sixth. From peak to midden in thirty years.
Again: This is a masterful work of witnessing and interpreting a Boomer life, so why not five stars? For my own reading tastes, it lacked emotional effect. There are wins and losses, weddings, births, and funerals, and none of that touched me. This has the makings of a lasting classic — it feels important and enduring — and it will earn every five star review it gets (from other, less cranky, reviewers).
I’ve collected whoever’s in here for their dedication to a moment that bends, not in a “gay” way but you know how when you’re walking towards the horizon it seemingly dips. And you feel something. That’s pathetic. It’s an empathetic thing. The light shifts and biologically we turn too. People get different.
Eileen Myles, who compiled the 100+ entries in Pathetic Literature, is an award-winning poet and has taught a graduate seminar on “Pathetic Literature” at UCSD; I humbly and happily acknowledge them as the expert on this topic. Filled with poems, essays, excerpts from novels and other musings, I took my time with this collection — reading a couple here and there in between other books — and I have to admit that that was partly because not everything here worked for me; some entries I found downright tedious; many I found exceptional. I grant that, as the expert on the topic, Myles has collected the works that they have found “frothy”, but I suspect that — if the metric is “writing that makes you feel something” — I might collect something different; this has the feel of a subjective anthology, and it didn’t always work for me personally. I can’t give a four star “I love it” rating (my own subjective opinion), but I am not sorry to having picked this up and been exposed to such a compelling range of thought. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
From the first entry, I felt provoked: This poem by Alice Notley (I believe a mentor of Myles’) is here in its entirety (and is the kind of thing that suggests that I will never truly understand poetry):
All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever wanted,
and still do.
So, while that left me scratching my head over what I was in store for, I was delightfully dipped and swerved by the second entry: the short work we’re the only colored people here by Gwendolyn Brooks, in which a Black couple chooses to attend a typically whites-only movie theatre in 1945 despite what the others might think of them, “She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.” I was completely empathetically engaged in that story, as well as, later, shaken up by If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes:
As long as I knew I was going to kill him, nothing could bother me. They could beat my head to a bloody pulp and kick my guts through my spine. But they couldn’t hurt me, no matter what they did. I had a peckerwood’s life in the palm of my hand and that made all the difference.
I was upset by Joe Proulx in An Obituary (wherein a man is trying to seduce another man while telling stories from his time as an American soldier in Iraq):
The children drowned to death in boiling water, their silhouettes frozen on the walls from the heat of the initial impact, their flesh and eyeballs stuck to the cement forever. My colleagues and I toured what were once some of the world’s leading hospitals, hospitals which had been transformed into hovels of hospice — not on accident, by collateral damage, or due to lack of national export, but by calculated efforts on the part of the Clinton administration, whose bombs were targeting public hospitals, sewage treatment plants, and water filtration systems — policy meant, in the words of Clinton’s secretary of Defense, to accelerate the effect of sanctions.
And I was absolutely delighted by Jack Halberstam’s hilarious takedown of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle:
Thank god I am a white man, I thought, and I don’t have to engage in the tiresome jockeying for position that marks the work of homosexuals and women. No, a white man can just sit down and write and he writes his way into the whole world! The fact that this “world” also comprises mostly other white men in no way invalidates the labor, the art, the craft, the sublimity of what we write. In fact, by building on each other and on the work that came before us, we can bypass the petty squabbles of the others and just dig into the important stuff — like whether to eat cornflakes or museli for breakfast, how best to appreciate pornography and what to do about the crazy women who pursue us.
I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be unsettled by The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan (and although I hadn’t heard of him before, what I eventually learned about his life and art certainly caused a dip in my horizon):
4/ 25/ 95 Letterman. Couch. Drugs. How we do drag on. Getting hard to breathe again. Thought I was doing much better. It never lasts. My mood has been better, though. And I’ve got a renewed interest in sex, mostly fantasizing about this alligator clip thing, and trying it out a little bit with a couple of clips here and there, those jagged little teeth biting into my tender spots as I grab hold of something like the bed rail and squeeze until the pain floats off a little, turns sweet almost, and then it’s time for another. It’s almost like eating hot chili peppers, except these taste buds are in my balls.
There were entries from well-known figures — from Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; entries from Borges, Kafka, Victor Hugo, and this poem from Rumi which did stir me:
Yesterday I went to him full of dismay.
He sat silently, not asking what was wrong.
I looked at him, waiting for him to ask,
“How were you yesterday without my luminous face?”
My friend instead was looking at the ground.
Meaning to say, Be like the ground, humble
and wordless.
I bowed and kissed the ground.
Meaning to say, I am like the ground, drunk
and amazed.
It’s hard to give a flavour of this collection overall — passages quoted are mostly things I liked, while some things I didn’t like went on for mind numbing pages and pages — but again, this is Myles’ project and presumably conforms to Myles’ tastes and I’m glad it exists.
Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” she read. “I can’t believe it! I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled, Smiling Girl?” She ran a finger over the terse nameplate. “Not just Horse,” she said. “The horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.”
Based on what is known of Lexington (America’s “greatest racing stallion” and the most successful stud of his time), Horse returns to Geraldine Brooks’ familiar territory of mixing history, science, and art to tell a compelling story of the past, while using that history to make commentary on the present. The focus here is on rediscovering the stories of the enslaved Black horse handlers in the pre-Civil War South — and especially those known and imagined figures who bred and trained Lexington and other well-known racehorses of the day — and by having a Black man tracing those stories in the present, there’s opportunity for social commentary and an investigation into how far American society has changed (or not). The plot in each timeline truly was compelling — I equally wanted to know what would become of Lexington and his handlers in the past and what the characters in the present would learn about them — and while Brooks did a fine job of making me care about the characters, I had just the queasiest feeling that these weren’t, ultimately, her stories to tell. (And I honestly don’t know how to square that feeling: can’t a white Australian writer tell stories about enslaved Black people in the American South if the intention is to bring their history back to life? Even if her husband was a Civil War expert?) No full marks, but a very interesting and worthwhile read.
Dr. Warfield grimaced. “Four white feet and a white nose — throw him to the crows.” Then the doctor laughed. “Lot of old wives’ nonsense, judging a horse by the color of his socks.”
(Ah yes, Doctor: we wouldn’t want to judge a horse by its colour.) Lexington (initially named “Darley”) was foaled in 1850 at Dr. Warfield’s stud farm, The Meadows, and put into the care of his well-regarded trainer, Harry Lewis (a formerly enslaved Black man who had purchased his own freedom). As Brooks imagines it, and based on an actual lost painting described as “Lexington being led by black Jarret, his groom”, Harry Lewis has a young son named Jarret, whom he entrusts with the horse’s daily care and training. Jarret develops an unbreakable bond with Lexington, and as he is still an enslaved person himself, Jarret will find his fate tied up with the horse’s as Lexington’s racing career sees him sold up and down the river.
Obedience and docility: valued in a horse, valued in an enslaved human. Both should move only at the command of their owner. Loyalty, muscle, willingness — qualities for a horse, qualities for the enslaved. And while the horse had two names, the men had only one. Theo let the resentment rise inside him. Then, as he’d trained himself to do, he crushed it. Just as a lump of coal, under pressure, could become a diamond bit, Theo had learned to turn his anger into something he could use.
In the current day (2019), Theo is an art history grad student in Washington, D.C. who discovers an intriguing horse painting on a neighbour’s trash heap. Theo’s parents were in the foreign service — his father from California, his mother from Nigeria — and having been raised primarily in British boarding schools, despite being a Black man, he is absolutely disconnected from the African American experience (his last Black girlfriend dumped him for literally whistling Dixie.) When Theo goes to the Smithsonian in order to research pre-Civil War equine painting, he crosses paths with Jess: an Australian osteopath who now runs the bone lab for the Smithsonian, and who, coincidentally, has been approached by a British veterinarian who would like access to Lexington’s bones, which are in the museum’s collection. Theo and Jess work together discovering the stories behind the painting and the bones, but I found something rather distancing (no doubt by design) in the fact that the modern day characters are all non-Americans (is that how Brooks gets around the “Own Voices” issue? By not presuming to speak for an African American?) In the past, Jarret crosses paths with the painter Thomas Scott several times, and it would seem that every time, Jarret needs to explain to the painter that the white man doesn’t actually know anything about an enslaved Black person’s reality, as when Scott seems surprised that Jarret wouldn’t be jumping to enlist during the Civil War:
“Mr. Alexander commenced to pay us wages right after the president’s proclamation. What makes you think I’d give that up to take orders from some White officer, a stranger, who don’t care if I live or die? Just another massa, is all I see. We suffered enough on account of slavery already I don’t plan on laying my life down to end it. You folk who made this mess, I reckon you owe us to clean it up.”
In addition to these two timelines, there’s a third, lesser in my opinion, plotline tied in: In the 1950s, “pioneering gallerist” Martha Jackson (supporter of the avant garde, friend of Jackson Pollock) acquired a painting of Lexington which would ultimately stick out among the abstract works left to the Smithsonian upon her death, and Brooks imagines how it would have come into her hands. This bit felt tacked on, and even if Brooks found it to be an interesting part of Lexington’s story (or at least the story of paintings made of him), it didn’t add much to me. (And as Brooks gives a little bio at the end of the real figures in the story, she apparently showed restraint by not divulging within the novel that Dr. Warfield was the attending doctor at Mary Todd Lincoln’s birth; that seems a more interesting fact as the Civil War eventually affected Lexington’s, and Jarret’s, [and Warfield's!] fates.)
As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would also need to be about race. Horse farms like the Meadows and Woodburn prospered on the plundered work and extraordinary talent of Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys. Only recently has their central role in the wealth creation of the antebellum thoroughbred industry begun to be researched and fully acknowledged.
And that, from the afterword, is the point: Not only were the Black horsemen not acknowledged in their day, but after the Civil War and Reconstruction, they were harassed out of horse racing all together. (There’s a parallel made to Theo being bullied out of playing polo at Oxford, but again, that felt like an outsider tale with little relevance to the African American experience.) Still: beyond righting historical wrongs, horse racing itself is an exciting subject to read about — the pounding hooves and flying manes — and Lexington was a winning and magnificent race horse. Brooks makes it exciting, and the research into the painting and bones has the feel of solving the clues of a mystery; all compelling material that held my interest throughout.
When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing. The socks become a Motherthing, scribbles the cigarette-smoking lab coat man, who tastes his pen and continues writing: They can hug it and stroke it and put their cheek against it and it calms them down, really calms them down. The way a mother would. A real remarkable effect. The baby monkey’s heart rate decreases, blood pressure lowers, all the magic medicine a mother is.
I grinned and grimaced and gritted my teeth all through Motherthing — I would actually love to see a time-lapse recording of my facial expressions as I read this — and as much as one can say, “This is a little bit horror and a little bit comedy”, Ainslie Hogarth seems to have invented something completely unique here. Sure: Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad are doing something similar with their unhinged unhappy young female main characters, but Hogarth adds in a relatability factor that had me aching for Abby Lamb. The writing is crisp and fizzy (and so, so dark) — from the sentences to the overall plot — and I gobbled up the whole thing in a few short hours. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“Bottomless brown eyes,” I repeat, wincing as I open my can, a mysterious habit with an origin I’ve buried for good reason I’m sure.
“They were strange. Almost frothing.”
I sip my soda, slurp the rim. “Brown hot tubs.”
He frowns. “You’re thinking about diarrhea.”
“Well, obviously, Ralph. You’re thinking about diarrhea too.”
“Only because I know that you are.”
“Perfect body temperature, thick enough to hold you. Might actually be better than water.”
He admits with a shrug that it would be nice to sag nearly suspended, perfectly warm, in a pool of slack shit. “It would have to be ethically sourced, of course.”
This exchange, from the second page, might be a good barometer for another reader’s enjoyment of Motherthing: Not only did this weird potty humour surprise and tweak the pleasure centres in my brain, but I found it to portray the obvious deep connection and compatibility between this couple masterfully; if this exchange does not provoke, amuse, and click the characters into place for you, this might not be a book for you. As for me: I was all in.
As we eventually learn: Ralph and Abby were incredibly lucky to have found one another. Both raised by narcissistic single mothers — Abby’s was neglectful, exposing her daughter to abusive situations as she sought love from a string of men; Ralph’s was guilting and manipulative, emotionally blackmailing her son to give her the love she needed — Abby and Ralph were able to provide for one another the pure and selfless love they had always been missing. Not long before the book begins, Ralph and Abby were manipulated into moving in with his sick mother in order to care for her, and in the opening paragraph, this mother, Laura, has made good on a lifetime of empty threats and opened her wrists in the basement. While Abby believes her mother-in-law’s death will finally free them from her clutches, Ralph is convinced that Laura’s spirit still haunts the house, and he’s not ready to let her go.
The ghostly bits are more uncanny than chilling, and throughout, Hogarth had me wincing at her provocative physical descriptions:
• A small man who seems to wear his flesh, hoisting and adjusting it like a child in his father’s suit jacket, is standing behind a chest-height desk. He comes around and greets us. “You must be the Lambs.” He extends his hand, shaking it free of its flesh-sleeve, connecting first with Ralph, then with me. The top of his head barely comes to my chin, but he’s practiced a way to make it seem like he’s not looking up at you. “How are you both?”
• Ralph is doing that weird smile again, like the back of his skull is pulled off and Laura is manipulating his folds with her hands.
• I look at her face. How her skin pools on the bed so her head seems like a melted candle, lips parted, mouth empty, small hard skull a hidden treasure buried in wax.
And throughout, there is much developed about womanhood and motherhood (there’s no blame assigned to the couple’s absent fathers), and as a piece of feminist fiction, it’s not incidental that this story is told solely from Abby’s POV:
Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they’re just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.
As the plot progresses and we are shown how people try to replace mother love (with motherthings and surrogates), Ralph becomes more lost in his fantasies and Abby becomes more desperate to save him; the line between mental illness and the supernatural is blurred and Abby believes that if only she could be an ideal of wifeliness (a Good Woman) she could rescue Ralph (the Perfect Good):
I see it now, the contours of a plan, a perfect food or, rather, a meal perfectly executed, which will revive that long-buried instinct in Ralph, to be alive, despite the shock of it. To stay alive, despite the pain of it. A food, a flavor, offered once by his Motherthing to make suddenly being alive all right. I can revive that instinct. I can replicate that flavor.
I just have to grab a few things first.
I see now that I didn’t pull much in the way of funny quotes, but I did laugh out loud at Motherthing; I also cringed and gasped and was genuinely touched. And now I want to buy a fish-shaped mould and make jellied salmon (with an inset olive eye) for my husband’s dinner, because that would be funny.
She and Damienne defended themselves against the ravening, mad beasts forever attacking them, steadfast with their guns and the dead man’s sword, and with the arquebus, which by then she could so skillfully wield that she once shot three bears in a day. And the last bear — this, she told (Thevet) — was “as white as an egg”.
The publisher’s blurb calls The Bear Woman a blending of “autofiction and essay”, so while it would be tempting to think of this as a straight-up historical investigation into a remarkable woman who has been mostly lost to memory, I think it’s important to underline the fiction in “autofiction” and recognise that author Karolina Ramqvist isn’t merely writing about that investigation here. Like Rachel Cusk or Karl Ove Knausgård, Ramqvist gives the details of a work of nonfiction while subtly crafting something larger and deeper, and I was intrigued and moved by the whole thing. This is art, and I loved it. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
From that day on I couldn’t stop thinking about her. This period now seems almost like a delimited space in time, those first years with a husband and three children — and her entry into my life right then. It wasn’t so much the thoughts in my head — they weren’t particularly developed as far as I recall — but more how I pictured her. She seemed so close, as though she and I were in the same room, or as if the distant place where she was were materializing here: her body clad in bearskin and a tattered, high-necked dress; or naked, her skin’s every extravasation exposed, beaten, dirty and blushing, pale against the darkness, the ground, the mountain and earth.
On the surface, this is the story of young noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval (that might be her name; all we can say for sure is that her first name was Marguerite), who, in 1541, was taken on a voyage from her native France to the New World, where she was eventually marooned with her maidservant on a deserted island in the St. Lawrence River. Ramqvist responds to Marguerite’s story as a feminist and as a writer and we follow along as she (or, at any rate, the book’s narrator) reads primary sources and travels and consults maps and museums and experts to fill in the gaps in Marguerite’s story. This is also the story of a writer (and wife and mother) and how unravelling Marguerite’s history challenges and changes her personally. In an afterword, Ramqvist creates distance from the narrative by stating, “Like the narrator of this book, I too was captivated by the story of the bear woman without really knowing anything about her.” And in the body of the work, while contemplating the three contemporaneous sources for Marguerite’s story, Ramqvist writes:
For the most part, I resist critical interpretations of a text based on the author’s biography — possibly too much. It’s probably because I have a persisting suspicion that this type of interpretation affects women who write differently than it does men, because what men write about is considered universal, whereas women ostensibly only write about themselves.
All of that to say: I will also resist assuming that everything that happened to this narrator happened in exactly this way to the author. The Bear Woman definitely does have a feminist slant: this is the story of a female writer rediscovering an historical female figure (who was mistreated in her time because of her sex) and insisting that her story be told and remembered alongside the men commemorated in history books. Of the three writers who memorialised Marguerite in the sixteenth century, the most interesting to me (probably because she got the most space from Ramqvist) was Marguerite de Navarre: an author, queen, and powerful figure in her day, she was inspired by Boccaccio’s The Decameron to assemble her own collection of stories (eventually writing seventy-two in her posthumously published Heptaméron), and I was as nonplussed as the author to learn that despite Marguerite de Navarre’s power, position, and education, she was portrayed as a mere dalliance for Henry VIII in TV’s The Tudors (despite Marguerite de Navarre actually being busy at that exact time rescuing her brother, the King of France, from false imprisonment. But, alas, so are women’s stories told.)
I never really wanted to commit my research to paper. Instead I imagined immersing myself in the material, becoming one with the facts, then all I’d have to do was write. I wanted her to arise in me. I had no desire to see that we were two separate people, and her continued subjugation was the link that spanned the time between us; here I was, a person in a position to exert power over her. Yet another one.
This could have been interesting bit of historical fiction if it were merely a retelling of Marguerite de La Rocque’s harrowing experience (and it would seem that Elizabeth Boyer did a competent job of telling that tale in the 80s with A Colony of One), but it’s Ramqvist’s response to the material that elevates this to a serious work of art. I loved the story and the writing and the peek inside the author’s mind; rounding up to five stars.
A few months before I turned 30, I was told that the National Geographic Channel had picked up a new TV series and I had, amazingly, been chosen as the host. This series would take me all over the world to live with different groups of indigenous peoples, participate in their customs and rituals, and learn their stories and myths in the hopes of getting a more full understanding of the veracity and importance of some legendary creatures in their cultures. Despite the fact that the only international trips I’d taken before this were to Montreal’s Biodome for a biology-club field trip in seventh grade, Puerto Rico for a microbiology conference, and a couple of self funded wildlife filming expeditions to Costa Rica, I was naively confident that this series would be nothing I couldn’t handle.
I never saw National Geographic’s Beast Hunter (which ran for five episodes in 2011), but that isn’t a necessary precursor to enjoying host Pat Spain’s account of filming the series. A Living Dinosaur: On the Hunt in West Africa: Or, How I Avoided Prison But Was Outsmarted by a Snail is one of six short books that Spain wrote about his time filming with Nat Geo — as he travelled the world looking for monsters and cryptids — and the result in this volume is charming, funny, and thoughtful. As a wildlife biologist, Spain is fascinated by the critters he encounters in the West African rainforest — from millipede to silverback — and as a wide-eyed fish-out-of-water traveller, he has plenty of you-couldn’t-make-this-stuff-up stories about his madcap adventures. Personally, I might have preferred an opportunity to read all six volumes together — or, at any rate, for this book to be longer or deeper — but if my only complaint is that I wanted more, that’s not much of a complaint at all. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The first shoot of the series would be looking for the truth behind stories of a supposed living dinosaur, Mokele M’bembe, in West Africa, and I had been warned by our series producer Barny and executive producer Harry that it would be my “trial by fire”.
Mokele M’bembe is said to be a sauropod type dinosaur that has survived into modern times in the rivered borderlands between Cameroon, the Congo, and the Central African Republic; a dangerous long-necked beast that threatens the native population and which Western biologists have been searching for for a hundred years. Spain and his more experienced crew are embedded in traditional villages among Baka and Bayaka people, where they participate in village life and get a sense for the monster's habitat. Not only is Pat Spain a scientist himself, but “as the great nephew of the ‘Prophet of the Unexplained’ Charles Fort”, Spain approaches the idea of cryptids with an open mind; who are we to tell indigenous peoples around the world that their legends aren’t based on fact? (Also: Who are we to say that indigenous peoples around the world aren’t savvy enough to keep telling stories of encounters with mythical creatures in order to attract Western researchers with their cash and gifts?)
I suspect that the story of the actual hunt for Mokele M’bembe is well-documented in its episode of Beast Hunter, but for the most part, this book is concerned with the behind-the-scenes story: Everything from how Spain met his wife in college to how he had to be taught how to stand in a “hero pose” against exotic locations for B-roll footage. There are many roadblocks (literal and figurative) along the way and much of the humour is of the variety found in the name of the second chapter: “An Africanized Killer Bee Just Landed On My Penis,” “He Poops Just Like Us!” said the Pygmy Children Gathered Around Me, and Other Scatological Tales of Mystery and Intrigue. I did smile at all of it (Spain is a charming storyteller), but he also has some more serious insights to share about cultural bias or the value of cryptid hunting:
Too many scientists forget that the general public does not consist primarily of other scientists, and most people would rather hear about the possibility of a bipedal intelligent ape walking around the Great North Woods than the reality of the new barnacle you discovered. Run with that — talk about the possibility. It will get people listening. Then you can throw in some stuff about wolverines, the reintroduction of wolves, and pine martens. Make it something that people, real people, will find interesting. Throw in some jokes, give some sexy facts — more people will be interested in your lame barnacle if you lead with the fact that it has the largest penis-to-body ratio of any animal in the world. It’s over six times the total length of its body! And that’s why they call me “Barnacle Pat”… Okay, you see where I’m going. Don’t refuse to talk about something because you think it sounds silly.
This was a quick and entertaining read — more travelogue than scientific investigation — and I will look for the other volumes in this series.
“It’s a self-portrait,” Iphigenia said. “It’s a portrait of Ula, young, maybe even a teenager, holding an infant. It’s called Self-Portrait with Nothing.”
I’ve seen Self-Portrait with Nothing shelved as Sci-Fi or Fantasy, but it’s really a bit of light Mystery with a twist of magical realism: Pepper Rafferty is a thirty-six-year-old academic and forensic anthropologist — working at the university on archaic remains and with the police on fresh ones — and hers is a loving and stable life, supported by her two moms and the husband she married seven years earlier. When Ula Frost — a famous artist from Pepper’s hometown — is reported missing, a strange connection between the two women, and a threatening group on Pepper’s heels, will propel Pepper from clue to clue on the reclusive artist’s shadowy trail across Europe. Like a mix of Recursion, The Da Vinci Code and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a nod to the Bones novels, debut novelist Aimee Pokwatka has written an interesting and engaging story. Pepper and her husband, Ike, are wonderfully and believably fleshed out, but if I had a complaint, the rest of the characters are just kind of props (some cartoonishly so) for Pepper’s story. The magical twist isn’t really explained (it’s just accepted, but is it necessary?), and while Pepper follows a series of puzzles, codes, and clues, I wouldn’t really call this a mystery. With a background in anthropology and an MFA, I reckon Pokwatka is going for literary fiction here, and while Pepper does come to some conclusions about life and its meaning, there’s nothing very deep or revelatory here. Still, easy and entertaining, I was happily propelled along. Slight spoilers beyond here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When Pepper couldn’t sleep — at least since she was fifteen — she imagined the alternate universes that might be out there if alternate universes really existed. A universe where antibiotics had already stopped working. A universe where cancer had a cure. A universe where that man had never become president and started that war, and all the people who’d died and the cities that’d been destroyed still lived and stood perfectly intact. A universe where she hadn’t met Ike in the hotel lobby of a conference about the evolution of human sexuality. A universe where they’d met but hadn’t skipped out on the conference in favor of drinking hurricanes at the hotel bar and ended up in Ike’s room shortly thereafter. A universe where they’d broken up that time she told him she couldn’t see herself married instead of staying together. A universe where the pregnancy scare had been an actual pregnancy, and now they had a couple of kids, and two dogs and a cat, who was the boss of them all, and it was chaos and she mostly loved it.
Pepper has long been intrigued by the idea of alternate universes — and drawn to the idea that her life might be playing out in better, happier ways elsewhere despite having what looks like a happy life in this one — so she has also always been intrigued by the rumours about Ula Frost’s paintings: Apparently whenever she paints a person’s portrait, the subject’s doppelgänger is summoned from a parallel universe, with generally unhappy results. But that’s just a rumour, right? When Ula goes missing and presumed dead, and Pepper is for some reason named as her executor, a threatening visit from The Everett Group sends Pepper after a trail of breadcrumbs that may or may not turn her world upside down.
There was something very engaging about Pepper’s character: I liked how serious she was about her work, the interesting backstory of being raised by two moms (partners in life and a veterinary practice), her believable relationship with her husband Ike. And I liked that Ike was a fellow academic: an historian who seemed most interested in women’s stories (while Pepper is travelling through Europe, Ike is exploring and sharing the diaries of a single woman who travelled with a wagon train along the Oregon Trail). Their phone and text conversations — sometimes friendly, sometimes impatient — were believable and relatable. But no other characters were really fleshed out (the moms and a police officer are introduced early, and they seemed really interesting, but aren’t really revisited), the mystery aspect wasn’t really intense (we just follow along with the clues), and I still don’t know if the magical paintings (or cartoonish bad guys) were necessary for Pepper to come to the following conclusion:
In every universe there was still plenty of uncertainty and grief, and kindness and anger and suffering and joy, beautiful things and miracles and tragedies that knocked people on their asses, there were mistakes and forgiveness, second-guessing and the question of what else might be out there — all constants in every universe, all existing at the same time. Pepper felt the innumerable universes around her, and then she let them go.
Still: This was a breezy read with much to like in it. No regrets.
I was seven that November when we were tossed from our apartment in St. John’s. I had lived in twenty houses by then. I don’t remember a lot of them, but most of them were scattered along a couple of roads in a place called the Goulds, about an hour away from town. It wasn’t much of a place, not even a village, but it was where Jennie was born and where her parents, Lucy and Ned, still lived, on Petty Harbour Road.
You might think that a memoir covering a span of six months as a seven year old would be of scant general interest or entertainment value but the story within Jennie’s Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood is surprising, engaging, and full of heart. Reading like narrative nonfiction, Wayne Johnston’s account of having been a sickly child with a chaotic home life is told with warmth and humour, and has a satisfying narrative arc. And for anyone who has read a pile of Johnston’s novels, as I have, there’s something very intriguing about seeing the influences behind his later writing; between this and The Mystery of Right and Wrong, I feel like I’ve gotten to really know the author this year and the experience has been a delight. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Repairing me seemed to be impossible because no one seemed to know why I was sick. A doctor I could not remember having been to see had once said I had a nervous cough. Jennie seemed to think I had a nervous cough because I was nervous all the time. She said she had heard of other people who had nervous coughs, but she never named them. Calling it a nervous cough made it sound like I was constantly trying to clear my throat, but that wasn’t the case. The cough was so deep, so loud and so relentless that each of my three brothers had tried to kill me to shut me up.
Born the third of four sons (with more siblings to follow), Wayne’s barking cough was so disruptive that not only was he forced from his brothers’ bedroom at sleep time (aided in hauling his rollaway “bedmobile” into the living room at night, where his insomnia kept him awake), but he was banished from school and usually removed from Mass in the clutch of a coughing fit. After his father drank away the rent money, again, the family relocates to a substandard house across the street from Wayne’s maternal grandparents, and when his parents take the bus into town to work, and his brothers go to class, Wayne spends the days with his grandmother, Lucy: a loving, deeply religious woman who is still mourning the untimely death of her own young son so many years before and who knows that iced chocolate Quik, taken three sips at a time, is the only thing that Wayne is able to consistently hold down.
There is a health scare and trips to specialists, but this is mostly about the Johnston family dynamics: Wayne’s mother, Jennie, “ripping into” his father, Art, for secretly drinking away the poor family’s meagre means — until Art starts to berate himself and the whole family needs to gather around and tell him what a great man he is. Wayne’s brothers enjoy digging into him — making the case that everything would be better if he wasn’t so sick, putting so much pressure on their parents — until Wayne starts to cry and the brothers hug and reassure him. This is the story of a family, and especially seven year old Wayne, under tremendous strain, but it’s not bleak: this is a story with a tremendous amount of heart and warmth.
I didn’t want to be led to the living room by Jennie and have to kneel with her while she held my hand to keep me from losing my balance and tipping over sideways like a statue. I didn’t want to walk among the same grown-ups I had walked among the day Lucy had her false alarm, Jennie’s boy dressed to the nines as if nice clothes could disguise the fact that I looked as though I would be the next to go.
Because this reads a bit like a novel, I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I do want to make the point that you don’t need to have read Johnston’s novels to be moved and entertained by this memoir (there are medical mishaps! brawls! car chases!). Turns out, six months in the life of this seven year old makes for a very satisfying tale.
I overwhelmed myself with tragedy, it broke out everywhere, from all sides. And I’m to blame. At least you might think that, but I, I know that it doesn’t matter to me. There’s nothing to do about boredom, I’m bored, but one day I won’t be bored anymore. Soon. I’ll know that it’s not even worth the trouble. We’ll have the easy life.
Released for the first time in English (in a translation by Emma Ramadan), with an introduction by American novelist Kate Zambreno, Marguerite Duras’ ironically titled The Easy Life fits in nicely with my notion of the midcentury French philosophical novel (à la Camus or de Beauvoir), where there is less plot (action) than interior monologue (reaction), but despite the out-of-timeness of this narrative, I think that Duras captured something true and enduring about the restrictions imposed (even self-imposed) on the female life and mind. As Zambreno recounts in the Intro, written in 1943 — at a time when Duras’ husband was a prisoner at Buchenwald for his participation with the French Resistance (as Duras likewise had participated) and having suffered some personal tragedies that are echoed in the plot — Duras would later report that this novel poured out of her, “as if in one breath”. Told from the POV of a twenty-five-year-old French farmgirl (the same age Duras had been when she wrote this, set in the rural locale of her own late father’s childhood), this is the story of an existential crisis and how a person might overcome both chaos and ennui to find a way — or even a reason — to live. A bit old-fashioned and cerebral, The Easy Life is less about story than philosophy but I identified with the humanity of this and am pleased to have read Duras for the first time. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
I didn’t say anything else to Maman. But Jérôme had to disappear from Les Bugues. So that Nicolas could begin to live. It had to stop someday. That day had come.
As The Easy Life opens, the narrator, Francine, explains that her younger brother, Nicolas, has just had a violent run-in with their uncle, Jérôme. Francine soon shares that the family’s fortunes were negatively affected by Jérôme’s actions over the years — he had frittered away the family money, making it so Nicolas couldn’t have an education and Francine could not marry; the family had even been forced out of a middle class life in Belgium because of Jérôme (and his more recent actions had been even less honourable) — so although the uncle seems an unrepentant drain on the family, it’s nonetheless surprising when no one really reacts as Jérôme screams in agony for days from what will become his deathbed. Francine herself is a passive and emotionless character — working on the family farm and serving others in the house because it is expected of her — and all of the characters more or less drift across each others’ paths, counting off the days of toil until their own deaths. When tragedy truly strikes the household, Francine experiences an existential crisis and she is offered a solo trip to the seaside to get her head in order. Part Two of the novel concerns her time away and mostly consists of Francine’s inner monologue that runs like:
My life: a fruit I must have eaten some of without tasting it, without realizing it, distractedly. I am not responsible for this age or for this image. You recognize it. It must be mine. I’m all right with that. I can’t do anything differently. I am that girl, there, once and for all and forever. I started to be her twenty-five years ago. I can’t even hold myself in my arms. I am bound to this waist I cannot encircle. My mouth, and the sound of my laugh, never will I know them. Yet I wish I could embrace the girl that I am and love her.
Or:
I feel the proud weariness of being born, of having come to the end of this birth. Before me, there was nothing in my place. Now there is me in place of nothing. It’s a difficult inheritance. Hence the feeling that I am an air thief. Now you know it and you welcome being in the world. I steal my place from the air, but I am happy. Here. Here I am. I sprawl. It’s beautiful out. I am flour in the sun.
Even as Francine leaves the seaside after two weeks (Part Three), she is passive and detached from those around her, but when she returns to Les Bugues, she starts to see a way forward. Hers seemed a familiar (if extreme) coming of age story: I remember being twenty-five and wondering who I was or who I could be; wondering how to find meaning in the narrow space between boredom and chaos. And as Zambreno assures us in the Intro, this — Duras’ second novel — sets the foundations for everything that would eventually be known as “Durassian”; it’s considered an “important” novel, and it reads like one.
You were curious when your hand reached out to pick up this book. What is that curiosity? Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Is it ethereal or tangible? Like a loris, can it be categorized and classified, or like love, is it difficult to define? It feels impossible to choose precise words to answer these questions. And yet curiosity seems as if it should be definable because . . . well, because . . . because it is so simple. And perhaps it seems so simple because it is so common.
Obviously, it was curiosity that led me to reading Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, but for the life of me, I can’t now recall what I hoped to get out of this. I know I thought this would be a more accessible/general interest treatment of the phenomenon of “curiosity” (and was excited to learn that this is a book written by twin professors who approached the subject from their complementary backgrounds in Philosophy and Neuroscience), but honestly, as well conceived and crafted and presented as this material is, much of it was beyond my ken. I don’t regret challenging myself with this book, but sadly, there were few nodes, edges, cracks, or boundaries that held my slippery grip. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Curiosity is one word, one string of letters, one concept in the mind, but curiosity also has multiple manifestations, a plethora of practices, and kindred kinds in many bodies. Like a genus spanning species or our mother embracing her eleven children, curiosity is both one and many. The one and many nature of curiosity is an opportunity for the attainment of epistemic freedoms: we are permitted to be curious! But it is also a liability for the perpetration of epistemic injustices: we are permitted to be curious in less than many ways.
From the beginning, I was fascinated by the authors’ background (and being particularly curious about people, I do wish they had written about themselves more): Perry Zurn and Dani S Bassett were homeschooled by a mother who allowed them (and their nine siblings) to self-direct their education and follow their own interests. Yet, this was also a home that enforced strict traditional gender roles, so the twins eventually broke away, “Buoyed by the kindness of unlooked-for allies along the way, we broke down walls, crossed boundaries, and scaled heights to become the interdisciplinary scholars that we are today — scholars who are committed to recognizing and resisting the epistemic inequities that surround and suffuse us. We are definitively not what we were meant to be, but we are following the ever-becoming trajectory of the curiosity instilled in us: one that spans, one that connects, one that embraces, and one that builds; one that appreciates the crosscurrents and coalitions within and through which we come to know.” That brief introduction is all we get to the authors’ backgrounds, but Google tells me that today, Perry Zurn is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University, and Dani Smith Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. All that to note: Zurn and Bassett bring an incredible amount of experience and expertise to the table, and as academics who “are committed to recognizing and resisting epistemic inequities”, Curious Minds has a particular focus on nontraditional (read: non-Western, non-patriarchal) definitions of curiosity and knowledge-acquisition. Chapters alternate in voice and focus as each of the authors write from their own discipline, and throughout, much is quoted from thinkers (academic and literary) throughout the ages. But I don’t know if I ever really understood what curiosity is or how it works (and can acknowledge that the failing is my own.)
The busybody, the hunter, and the dancer each highlight a unique praxis of curiosity. Whether it involves collecting new bits of information, tracking down specific answers, or experimenting with breaks in tradition, each model illuminates a different modal dimension. They are not static representations of curiosity as such but rather dynamic depictions of how curiosity works, how it behaves, and what it does. They portray how curiosity moves. Throughout philosophical history, busybodying, hunting, and dancing capture specific kinesthetic signatures that map out different styles of knowledge network building in conceptual and social space.
I did find it useful when Zurn and Bassett explored these three models of curiosity, and for the most part (although they stress the types are not mutually exclusive), my own magpie mind seems to be a “busybody” (gadflying about, collecting tidbits, “attuned to the wide wildness of the world”), while the authors are more likely “dancers” (leaping, uprooting, exploring “with serendipitous inklings and exuberant hopes the limits of the seeable and the sayable”.) So while I nose about in the mud, the authors are spinning through the clouds, and that might just explain why I had trouble connecting with them.
Near the end, Curious Minds has a section on the future of education — and while I had hoped that I would find this practical bit more engaging (hoping, actually, that they would return to their own upbringing and explore how early academic freedom led to their ultimate academic success), it was still a bit murky for me. The writing throughout is highly crafted — and this does not read like a textbook — but while the authors were obviously delighting in wordcraft and wordplay, it felt like wordwork to me. Consider the following:
Cracks conduct movement and advance entropy. The crack of curiosity allows the hidden to fly with hatchling wings, the unthought to effuse in a lavalike flow, and the buried to root through nutrient-rich soil. A rooting radicle. A radical conception. A thought uprooted, rerooted, changed from the root as radicalized. A riddled similarity, the curious mind and the first fruition of the seedling are notably alike. As naturalist Charles Darwin penned in his The Power of Movement in Plants, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed . . . acts like the brain . . . ; the brain being situated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.” Tucking their head down in the safe darkness and anonymity deep beneath the turf, the radicle riotously flings their white sinewy arms into the superficial dirt and spreads their green leafy legs into the air. And then they walk. Walk the air. Walk the sky. Walk over the face of the sun. They walk a circumnutating trail and think — think about how the world looks from this angle, from that distance, from above, beneath, and aside. Their imbibition is a conduit for imbrication; the crack in the soaked seed coat from which the radicle first peers is the prerequisite for the curious walk by which edges of distinction overlap, layers of perception form, and networks of realization grow. When next it rains, we must pause beneath the sky to soak our woolen coats. Then we will stand on our heads and step our legs across the clouds.
Perhaps more aimed at a niche audience (of which I am not ultimately a member), I certainly admired this book, without completely connecting with its content.
