Siddartha

 

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.

I was in my favourite used book store last week (thousands of kms and decades back in time from where I find myself now), and browsing the spinner of the kind of cheap pocket paperbacks that I used to buy in my early twenties, this worn copy of Siddartha spoke to me: as just exactly the kind of thing I would have bought back then. Although I’ve never read Herman Hesse before, I always expected to, and if nothing else, this was an interesting entry into his work. Taken at face value — a young seeker, Siddartha, goes in search of teachers and experiences in order to understand the world; a quest that will take his entire, long life — I didn’t find this to be particularly deep or engaging. But taken in the context of Hesse’s experience — as a seeker himself who had fled an evangelical seminary in his youth to become an autodidact and influential author — I found this to be a more interesting commentary on early twentieth century spiritual thought than whatever exploration of Buddhist beliefs it may have been marketed as at the time. I didn’t love this for what I found on the page (although I can see how it might have blown European minds in its day), but I found a lot of value in what it says about the author and I am very interested in reading more from Hesse and seeing how this fits into his entire oeuvre.

In the evening, after the hour of contemplation, Siddartha said to Govinda: “Tomorrow morning, my friend, Siddartha is going to join the Samanas. He is going to become a Samana.”

Govinda blanched as he heard these words and read the decision in his friend’s determined face, undeviating as the released arrow from the bow. Govinda realized from the first glance at his friend’s face that now it was beginning. Siddartha was going his own way, his destiny was beginning to unfold itself, and with his destiny, his own. And he became as pale as a dried banana skin.

Long story short: Siddartha was raised a wealthy Brahmin and educated in the traditions of sacrifices and ablutions, but as a young man, he encountered a group of Samanas (poor wandering ascetics) and decided to join them. He eventually meets the Buddha himself, and while his friend Govinda will join the Illustrious One, Siddartha decides that what he needs are more experiences in his life; realising that wisdom cannot be taught, only self-discovered. Siddartha becomes rich — revelling in the pleasures of the flesh and wine and dice — but will one day awaken heartsick and nauseated by this life. He eventually settles down with a poor ferryman who had once been kind to him, and taking his cue from this uneducated but holy man, he will gain wisdom from the voice of the nearby river. In one last chance meeting between Siddartha and Govinda when they are old men, he explains:

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, good and evil, is also an illusion.

Reading this, I was put in mind of The Alchemist — another book that didn’t really resonate with me despite its popularity — and I had to remind myself that Siddartha came first (by some sixty-five years) and was no doubt ground-breaking in its day (even if today we’d find it inauthentic or problematic to learn of Indian philosophy from a German man). Still, I’m glad to have read this and am looking forward to discovering what it ultimately reveals about Hesse; it fits perfectly within my own life's quest for wisdom and meaning.

The Tomb of the Mili Mongga: Fossils, Folklore, and Adventures at the Edge of Reality

 

As we finished making fieldwork plans, I thought of something else to ask. “Umbu, have you heard of the mili mongga?” I saw sensible Ibu Jen smile and roll her eyes. But Umbu didn’t laugh. “Yes, Pak Sam!” he frowned in thought. “I have heard people talk about it.” I had to ask more. “Do you know anyone who might be able to tell us about it?” Umbu promised that he’d ask around and see what he could find out. I was definitely not prepared for where that question would take us.

Samuel Turvey, Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Conservation Biology at the Zoological Society of London, was on a fossil expedition on the Indonesian island of Sumba when repeated reports of a legendary “wildman of the jungle”, the mili mongga, demanded his attention. It seems that everywhere his research group travelled, they encountered people who had stories about their village’s past encounters with these hairy giants, and repeatedly, his group would follow these leads into the unknown. The Tomb of the Mili Mongga is the account of several of Turvey’s expeditions to Sumba: part travelogue, part lab report, part social commentary, this book is as much about what a people’s mythology says about them as it is the story of what Turvey actually discovered, and I found the whole thing to be fascinating. Exactly my jam. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

This book is about my explorations of an island on the other side of the world, to try to understand what kinds of unique species used to inhabit its remote landscapes, and what happened to these now-vanished animals. But it isn’t just a story about biology or biologists, even though I thought it would be when I started out on my adventure. There’s plenty of science and natural history in the pages that follow, which can hopefully also serve to illustrate the steps through which knowledge accumulates and science progresses; how sources of inspiration might be unexpected, requiring new leads to be followed in unplanned directions when confronted with things that we can’t easily rationalise.

The isolation of island ecosystems can lead to the evolution of unique species: Indonesia has not only been home to pygmy elephants and giant rats, but the so-called “hobbit” fossils (Homo floresiensis) found on nearby Flores suggest that it’s not impossible that the little explored (by Westerners) island of Sumba was once home to a vanished hominid like the legendary mili mongga. And everywhere that Turvey inquired about them, locals had stories about how previous generations dealt with the dumb giants (often putting them to work digging gardens or building walls) and could vaguely gesture to where they had been buried outside their villages (with the warning that their remains were not to be dug up). I really enjoyed Turvey’s adventure writing (from his repeated encounters with chewing betel nut with his hosts — unable to master spitting the juices, the red liquid would dribble helplessly down his chin, staining clothes and notepads — to exploring a cave where locals reported once finding a cache of bones, and discovering it was filled with human excrement and medical waste); his experience was consistently interesting and the storytelling is engaging. As a scientist, Turvey also relates everything back to his research, and this was not always 100% engaging for me — but I did enjoy learning about ideas such as “euhemerism” (that mythology — even the warring gods in Ancient Greece — is often history in disguise), the “Romeo Error” (species thought extinct sometimes turn up alive), and Lord Raglan’s theory (from 1939) that nonliterate societies turn memory into myth after about 150 years (interesting because the inhabitants of Sumba all talk as though the last encounter with a living mili mongga had been about that long [about five generations] in the past). There was much that I found fascinating here.

We may see the universe as fundamentally rational and following immutable natural laws, but to others it remains an enchanted place. As Christopher Hadley wrote in his fascinating investigation of the mythical English dragon-slayer Piers Shonks, “Searching for a kernel of truth by trying to remove the legendary elements misses something, it gets rid of the best bits.” Even amongst researchers, there is increasing recognition that “anthropology should always be open to the possibility of wonder.” It is imperative to consider the mystery of the mili mongga not just from our perspective as outside observers (the so-called etic perspective in anthropology), but also from the perspective of the culture that holds this differing worldview (the emic perspective). This can be extremely difficult — we are all brought up within our own specific cultures, with their own explicit and implicit conventions, assumptions and prejudices about structuring experience and making sense of the world. But if we can gain a different perspective, we might receive some truly surprising insights into how other cultures think about reality.

I particularly engage with these ideas of being “open to the possibility of wonder” and making a real effort to understand each culture’s unique worldview: as Turvey’s ultimate realm of concern is the conservation of threatened species, he ably makes the case that the best way forward just might take a detour through the folklore from the past. Fascinating read.

Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us

 

Then the cock crowed

This morning they dared to

They dared to murder you

In the fortress of our bodies

May our ideal live on

Mingled with your blood

So that tomorrow they won’t dare,

They won’t dare to murder us.

A novelisation of the true story of Fernand Iveton — a “pied-noir” Communist who acted against the ruling colonial government during Algeria’s first civil war — Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us is a remarkable act of witnessing of shameful historical events. Although short, this wasn’t a quick read for me: between heart-stopping depictions of torture, a frustrating show trial, and intermittent discussions of the societal issues at play, there was a lot to digest here and I took my time with it. Incidentally: I understand that the author’s name, Joseph Andras, is considered a pseudonym, and when this novel won the prestigious Prix Goncourt (for a first novel), “Andras” refused to accept it, stating that prizes distract from the making of art (and as his next book, Kanaky, concerned another real man’s fight against France’s continuing occupation of New Caledonia, Andras appears to be committed to important work, and perhaps anonymity is vital to that). This is a meaningful act of witnessing, incredibly well written, and I am grateful that this exists (and that I was alerted to its existence; thank you, Joy!)

All of his torturers sound the same, Fernand can’t distinguish between their voices anymore: similar timbre, just a lot of noise, goddamn hertz. What Fernand does not know is that the general secretary of police in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, made it explicitly clear, two hours ago, that he forbade anyone from touching the suspect. Teitgen had been deported and tortured by the Germans during the war. He could not understand why the police, his police, that of the France for which he’d fought, the France of the Republic, Voltaire, Hugo, Clemenceau, the France of human rights, of Human Rights (he was never sure when to capitalize), this France, la France, would use torture as well. No one here had taken any notice: Teitgen was a gentle soul, a pencil pusher offloaded from the metropolis just three months ago. He had brought his dainty ways along in his little suitcase, you should’ve seen, duty, probity, righteousness, ethics even — ethics my ass, he knows nothing about this place, nothing at all, do what you have to do with Iveton and I’ll cover for you, or so the chief had decided without hesitation. You can’t fight a war with principles and boy-scout sermons.

Fernand Iveton, a pied-noir — of European descent — Algerian Communist, was sympathetic to the indigenous side in the Algerian Civil War: thinking of it as more of a class war than a true struggle for independence, it was because Iveton loved France, and its ideals of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, that he joined the militant National Liberation Front in order to gain the attention of the ruling class. Not willing to actually hurt anyone, however, he did agree to plant a small bomb in an unused shed at the factory where he worked (set to go off after hours); but the authorities were watching the NLF and the bomb was recovered beforehand and Iveton was arrested, tortured, and charged with a capital offence.

The writing flits around between characters (note that the second passage I quoted moves between three different people in one paragraph), and chapters alternate between those detailing Iveton’s experience as an activist (from taking possession of the bomb onward through his imprisonment and trial) and chapters that depict his time in France (receiving treatment for TB) where he met the woman who would become his wife, Hélène. Andras contrasts harrowing accounts of electrocution and waterboarding with a truly sweet love story, and in either timeline, striking nature writing can occur at any time: The River Marne sticks out a green tongue to the sky’s peaceful blue…The moon yawns, its white breath a veil to the darkness. A star-formed meshwork — thousands of little keys opening the night…Green wavelets lapping on a mossy stone, the shapes of yellow snakes. Iveton does have several conversations that outline the class struggle that he believes he is participating in, and through incidental details (the lynching of any nearby “Arabs” whenever there’s an attack on a member of the ruling class, the fact that Iveton is given twice as many blankets and opportunities to wash as compared to his indigenous cellmates, etc), Andras clearly makes the anti-colonial case: Iveton seems to have been fighting on the right side of history.

He thinks of her every day. He cannot keep from doing it. Cannot keep from picking up the scattered pieces of their story, as if he had to put them in order between these walls, give them a meaning in this gray shithole, bulb on the ceiling, bunk stained by former inmates, one toilet between three. Give them a direction, a solid outline, thick, drawn in chalk or charcoal. Three and a half years together: one with the other, one through and for the other. Fernand collects whatever pieces his memory more or less readily restores to him, to form a brick — a cinderblock of love alone capable, in the face of an uncertain future, to break the bones and jaws of his tormentors.

Hélène.

The love story helps to make Iveton feel like a real and relatable person, and although from the beginning it’s clear that the authorities want to “make an example” of him, I did not previously know Iveton’s ultimate fate and there was much narrative tension as his case played out. Algeria would eventually gain its independence, Sartre and Camus would write about Iveton’s treatment in their day, an anonymous correspondent would pen the verses that inspired the title of this novel, and François Mitterrand — who had been Interior Minister during the conflict — would eventually attempt to atone for his draconian stance on Algerian freedom-fighters when he became President of France in 1981. In the face of “the silence of the State” over the years, Andras brings attention here to a voice that refuses to fade into oblivion and I am enlarged for having encountered both the author and his subject. Wonderful, if hard, read.

This was recommended to me by Joy — a goodreads friend who recognised that I was frustrated by Claire Messud's reference to (but eliding of) her family's experience as pieds-noirs during this Algerian Civil War in her upcoming novel This Strange Eventful History:  This is precisely the filling in of the story that I had been hoping for, and why I am so grateful for goodreads "friends".  I would love to check out Andras' next book, Kanaky, too.

Landscapes

 

A gong sounds. The butler announces that dinner is served. The group proceeds to the dining room. But the woman remains standing at the window. She looks at Poussin’s painting through its reflection in the glass, its colours slightly dulled. As she studies the scene of the abducted Sabine women superimposed on the layered landscape outside — the woods emptied of a few more living beings after each hunt, the unsightly thickets that were burned, the peasants displaced by the construction of the house, the folly that was torn down after she herself, barely fifteen, was assaulted in its stony interior — as she contemplates all this, she understands, not for the first time, the true cost of all this beauty.

I think that the above passage perfectly captures the point of Christina Lai’s Landscapes: this imagined scenario — in which a woman sees the reflection of a celebrated painting that depicts the worst of human behaviour (Nicolas Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women) overlaying the view of the idyllic landscape outside her manor house window — is dreamt up by the main character, Penelope, who, as an art historian and archivist living in a future England decimated by climate change, looks out the windows of the manor house she lives in (now used as a shelter for climate refugees) and wonders at the “true cost” of what she sees out there. Written as a series of Penelope’s diary entries as she and her partner prepare the dilapidated building for demolition — along with her archival notes on the last of the estate’s inventory, essays she has written on the depiction of male violence against women in art, and an intermittent third person omniscient narrative of her brother-in-law’s slow return to the family estate — this is more collage than straightforward novel; the plot is fairly thin. And as Penelope is the only character we really get to know — her partner and his brother are broadly painted as the good guy/the bad guy (as an expert on the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, Penelope identifies them from the start as the personifications of light and shadow, and I believe we are meant to see them more as types than people) — this really isn’t character driven. What Landscapes seems to intend is to give us a glimpse of a fairly grim future, and by overlaying it with the history of the depiction of violence against women in art (leading up to more recent responses by women artists), Lai is able to show the imbalanced power dynamics that have brought us to the brink; and that’s certainly worth exploring and archiving. This isn’t really an “enjoyable” read, but it is well crafted and gave me a lot to think about; that’s worth four stars any day.

It has been almost two years since it rained in this part of England. First came the floods, then came the droughts. Here at Mornington Hall, the one-thousand-acre parkland is parched, and the remaining leaves crumble between my fingers. Parts of the earth lie fractured, creating intricate webbing that spreads out like dark veins. I never thought I’d miss the cold, wet air on rainy days. We now count in millilitres, careful not to exceed the amount of water the government has allotted to the house. The small bottles Aidan and I pass between us are not only tools of survival, but also mementoes of a past that recedes further and further with each passing month.

The formerly great estate of Mornington Hall is crumbling: built with “sugar money” (ie, plantation slavery) and set in an artificially engineered idyllic landscape, the manor house has been unable to withstand earthquakes, high winds, and termite infestations; the man-made lake has dried up in the droughts; the non-native stands of trees have not survived the changing climate. It would seem that nature is fighting back against those who would presume power over it. Inside the manor’s remaining walls, Penelope works to archive the last of the estate’s possessions — most items of real value having been sold over the years to support their work as a nonprofit — and as she documents and packs the scrapbooks and postcards, she writes in her diary of her dread at seeing Julian once more: the brother she had been attracted to at first; the man who had once presumed to impose his power over her. Any tension in the plot comes from Penelope’s twin pressures: the clock ticking down on her time to complete the archive before she and Aidan must leave Mornington Hall, and the clock ticking down to her dreaded reunion with Julian. Meanwhile: Aidan is mostly absent (as an architect, he designs emergency refugee shelters) and Julian is a caricature of the filthy rich: buying out the entire first class carriage on a train so no one can presume to speak to him; literally brushing aside the poor and hungry so he can eat multi-course gourmet meals in several dome-covered city centres on his slow journey back to England.

As with the painting reflected in the window of the opening passage, this overlayering of images is a frequent motif: Penelope describes the uses of Claude glass and a stereoscope for her archive while Julian assesses the employment of holographic images to complete the facades of crumbling landmarks (like the Duomo in Florence) across Western Europe. And this overlayering effect is frequently tied with history and memory: the woman in the opening passage is forced to remember the assault she herself experienced in the past, Penelope literally saw a wash of red over everything in the aftermath of her own experience, and I believe that’s the ultimate point — the imbalance of power that leads to sexual assault is the same societal imbalance that once led to the depiction of rape as a popular artistic theme (were women clamouring for these scenes, or were they forced to concentrate on discussing technique in order to not look uncivilised?) and that’s the same societal power imbalance that has allowed for the rapacious few to despoil the Earth, unchallenged, for their personal gain; as we regard the changing landscapes outside our own windows, and overlay those sights with the history and memories we carry inside us, we have to wonder at the true cost of what we see.

When I was writing that long entry in February, I often thought of Louise Bourgeois, sculpting in her studio and transmuting emotions into physical form. Each sculpture was the chaos of memory made tangible. Art as a way of nullifying the past, of moving the self beyond pain. Once the work is done, it has served its purpose. Writing, too, is an exorcism. The past is negated through the act of transcribing words on the page, and the self re-emerges, alive in the here and now.

Writing, making art, bearing witness to reality through archiving ephemera: these seem to be the cure for the chaotic pull of memory; the appropriate response to power as we each decide what parts of our story we will memorialise, and which we will leave out. There’s so much more going on here than plot and setting and characters and Landscapes is a very worthwhile read: not least for the works of art it prompted me to look up and for what it all made me think about.

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

 

Everything alive has some kind of flux and ebb, and when that stops, life stops. When people say life is precious, they are saying that the rhythmic force that runs through all things — your wrist, your children’s wrists, God’s entire green earth — is precious. For my whole life, my pulse ran through me with such quiet power that I never had to think about it. And now they were having trouble finding it.

In 2020, at fifty-eight years old, best-selling author Sebastian Junger had a near-fatal health emergency (a ruptured aneurysm on a pancreatic artery; his odds of surviving, even with timely medical intervention, were around 10%), and while doctors at the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis worked frantically to save his life, Junger had a profound near death experience that forced him to consider the possibility of an afterlife for the first time. In My Time of Dying is a perfectly balanced account of Junger’s experience: part memoir (including previous brushes with death, as a surfer and as an embedded war journalist in Afghanistan), part investigation into the nature of reality (from others’ accounts of NDEs to the latest revelations from quantum physics), and part personalised processing of his experience and consequent research, this is rich storytelling that nicely blends awe and reason. I must admit that this is exactly my kind of thing (it’s the 28th title on my “death and dying” shelf) but I think it is an objectively excellent read; highly recommended. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Wilson was still working on my neck, and I was feeling myself getting pulled more and more sternly into the darkness. And just when it seemed unavoidable, I became aware of something else: My father. He’d been dead eight years, but there he was, not so much floating as simply existing above me and slightly to my left. Everything that had to do with life was on the right side of my body and everything that had to do with this scary new place was on my left. My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him. “It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to be saying. “Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.”

I enjoyed all of the biographical information (Junger was writing The Perfect Storm when he had his surfing accident; his great aunt Ithi had an affair with her algebra tutor, Erwin Schrödinger; Junger’s wife insisted he go to the hospital for his stomach pain, reminding the author of “the renowned statistic that married men live longer than unmarried men”), and we learn enough about Junger’s family and upbringing to understand that an encounter with the afterlife would be a shock in this group of atheists and scientists. Junger goes on to share all sides of the debate: stories from those who encountered the afterlife during near death experiences; perfectly rational explanations from scientists regarding brain activity at the time of death; and stories from others, like Junger himself, who understand and believe in the science but who nonetheless had profound NDEs that seemed to promise a continuation of the consciousness after death. And when Junger gets to the latest in quantum physics — explaining how unlikely the existence of the universe, and our place within it as sentient beings, really is — it’s easy to be persuaded to believe in something more.

Some interesting bits:

• “It doesn’t surprise me that you saw the dead. Not because I have strong beliefs about it, but because I have zero disbelief.”

• My worst fear — other than dying — was that because I’d come so close to death, it would now accompany me everywhere like some ghastly pet. Or, more accurately, that I was now the pet, and my new master was standing mutely with the lead watching me run out the clock.

• Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

• Scientists are so far from explaining consciousness that they can’t even agree on a definition, yet it is the crowning achievement of the physical world and seems to be the reason that anything exists in the form that it does. The circularity is audacious: a mix of minerals organized as a human brain summon the world into existence by collapsing its wave function, giving physical reality to the very minerals the brain is made of.

• Our universe was created by unknowable forces, has no implicit reason to exist, and seems to violate its own basic laws. In such a world, what couldn’t happen? My dead father appearing above me in a trauma bay is the least of it. When I tried to find the ICU nurse who had suggested I try thinking of my experience as something sacred rather than something scary, no one at the hospital knew who she was; no one even knew what I was talking about. It crossed my mind that she did not exist. My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death, and I couldn’t really know death until it came for me.

Really well written and interesting throughout, full stars from me.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

 

In the inverted world of Franz Kafka, guilt precedes sin and punishment precedes trial — so naturally, the cage precedes the bird. “A cage went in search of a bird,” he wrote with enigmatic flourish in 1917, when he was convalescing in the pastoral town of Zürau in the wake of his tuberculosis diagnosis. Two years earlier, he had abandoned The Trial, which begins with an abrupt arrest and ends with a roundabout admission of guilt; five years later, he would start The Castle, which begins with a series of vague recriminations and ends with a series of even vaguer wrongdoings, at least insofar as it can really be said to “end” at all. Strictly speaking, both novels are still unfinished: neither satisfied the famously implacable Kafka, whose perfectionism was a crucible, and both were incomplete at the time of his death. They are certainly cages — clenching, claustrophobic — and perhaps they are doomed to remain forever in search of their birds.

In her Introduction to A Cage Went in Search of a Bird (quoted above), literary critic Becca Rothfeld notes that this collection of ten short stories was written to honour the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death, explaining that many of these stories, “treat precisely the kind of entrapment that obsessed him: the kind that follows us wherever we go.” I found some of these stories ironically funny, some claustrophobically intense or recognisably “Kafkaesque” in their arbitrary, indomitable bureaucracy, and some…were less successful for me. My favourites were from Elif Batuman (The Board), Keith Ridgway (The Landlord), Leone Ross (Headache), and Charlie Kaufman (This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing), and as I’ve never read anything else by these authors, I am delighted to have sampled their writing here; I’ll be looking for their novels. As for the concept behind this collection: Most of the authors used their space to make commentary on the absurdities of modern life — or the absurdity of all human interaction — and I think that for the most part, they recognisably build on Kafka’s work. It’s an interesting mix and I am happy to have picked this up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Where did it go? What did the surgeonremover do with the carefully removed life-serum? How could you protect it wherever you stored it, from everything? the disastrous heat, the gutter dirt, the pollution, the things that changed, the terrible leavetakings, the journeying? ~Art Hotel

Honourable mention to Ali Smith, who opens the collection: in a strange and authoritarian (?) near future — in which a mother must say goodbye to her children with her eyes to evade the notice of CCTV cameras (as she pretends to be her sick sister in order to save her job at an “art hotel”, with people posing as statues and still life paintings for the amusement of the rich? It’s all a bit confusing) — a family leaves their house when they discover it has had a red line painted around it while they were away; and when the campervan they drive to a parking lot has also had a red line painted around it while they slept, the mother’s friend decides they will simply start walking.
What if they paint the line right over my shoes?
What bright red shoes you’ll have if anyone does that thing to you, Leif said.
Like I said: I found this one confusing — it might very well be the strongest of the collection — but I didn’t really connect with it (yet I do enjoy being challenged by Ali Smith).

As I paused to examine the bush, which appeared to be planted directly into the sidewalk, it turned to face me, and I realised with astonishment that it was, in fact, the broker: a young and emaciated man in a textured, shrubbery-colored coat. ~The Board

In Elif Batuman’s story, a woman is desperate to buy a flat in the city in which she has lived for eleven years (indeed, her family elsewhere is counting on her to succeed), and the narrative becomes increasingly absurd (as she is led up four flights of stairs in an apartment building in order to access the secret entrance to a ladder that would lead her down to the sub-basement), and between this woman’s powerless position and an unanswerable interrogation by the building’s board, this felt the most Kafkaesque. I especially liked the few times an item transformed into a person — the shrubbery was the broker, a cashmere scarf an old man — and this woman’s story is the story of anyone who doesn’t understand the rules of where they find themselves.

Had he been stealing from Kafka? He had never read this Octaviato whatever whatever. Had he? He was certain he had never heard of it. But his memory was going. He understood that much. If this unhoused woman knew it was from Kafka, someone else would, too. Were there other stolen things in the book? This was going to ruin him. ~This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing

Both Charlie Kaufman and Keith Ridgway write from the perspective of men who are unstable in their identities (with Ridgway’s protagonist being the more menacing, with “an axe in my trouser leg, a knife in my sleeve”), and they felt knowingly Kafkaesque (as was Leone Ross’ female protagonist, up against medical red tape: “She understands bureaucracy: if she can just find the right administrators she’ll get a box unticked or a screen changed in no time.”) And while I really liked this, I was kind of ambivalent about Joshua Cohen’s Return to the Museum — in which a Neanderthal in the prehistoric display makes ironic commentary on the museum’s patrons, including commentary on pandemic lockdowns:

Opinions, theories, paranoid conspiracies lowbrow and high-brow and all brows in between and even now I’m not sure that everyone here accepts the official explanation that there had been some sort of plague running rampant globally and everyone was staying away and home so as not to die and the government had ordered the shuttering of everything nonessential such as businesses and schools, strip clubs, places of worship, and concert halls, along with all museums, which as an interested party — as a beneficiary of museums — I’m not going to argue are non-nonessential . . . I’m evolved enough for that . ..

It felt like the main point was to equate pandemic lockdowns with Kafkaesque bureaucracy (including even a Neanderthal questioning the efficacy of masks upon the museum’s reopening), and Helen Oyeyemi’s odd text-message-epistolary story Hygiene seems to be a commentary on cleanliness and what was learned — even to obsession — in the pandemic. Tommy Orange’s The Hurt imagines that the next pandemic will be psychological, while Naomi Alderman’s God’s Doorbell (set in the future, with human-serving AI going rogue and building a new Tower of Babel) and Yoyun Li’s Apostrophe’s Dream (the punctuation tiles in a typesetter’s cabinet bemoan their increasing irrelevance in modern communication) share similar themes of humanity’s tools regarding us as their cold and distant gods. Overall: a strong collection of stories by celebrated authors; much to like here.