Obituaries of the scathing variety are really what inspired our ventures into the world of the macabre. I mean hello . . . it’s why we put the bitch in OBITCHUARY! Yes they’re hilarious, in an absurd morbid way, but really it’s the shock factor. Who would have thought that such a thing existed, and what would prompt somebody to write one? Well, as it turns out, there’s a variety of reasons. The truth of the matter is, some people just plain suck. We can all probably name at least one person in our lives worthy of some petty last words.
Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes have hosted a weekly podcast since 2021 called OBITCHUARY — which started as a venue for sharing “outlandish, hilarious, and sometimes scathing obituaries”, and has grown to include “bizarre history, strange funeral traditions” and a “dumb criminals segment” — and this is a compilation of some of their favourite findings. I expected Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book of Death to be more comprehensive (along the lines of Mary Roach’s Stiff), but while this is not a very serious look at the science or history surrounding death and its rituals, there was much here I hadn’t known before, all told in small, punchy bites. I feel this was written for a younger reader than I — the humour didn’t really land with me — but I do appreciate the effort to demystify that big unknown that’s coming for us all. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Examples of the facts and the writing style:
• Philip Clover of Columbus, Ohio, developed a device he called the “coffin torpedo” in 1878. In his words, it was a device created to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies.” It involved a system of triggers and springs that detonates an explosion of lead balls if the casket lid is opened after burial. Judge Thomas N. Howell invented his revision of the coffin-torpedo with the catchy slogan, “Sleep well, sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make mincemeat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat.” Hot damn. Imagine you’re just trying to get some cash for gold to get a bump on a Saturday night and — WHAMMY— your meat is minced, babe.
• Also known as lachrymatories, or tear vials, these were small containers that were believed to collect the tears shed by mourners during times of grief. These delicate glass or ceramic vessels were usually ornately designed and came in various shapes and sizes. It became a tangible expression of grief one could hold on to, to demonstrate the depth of their emotions, as it was believed that capturing tears symbolized the depth of one’s sorrow and love for the departed. Some even thought that evaporating tears were a way to send messages to the afterlife. We think these catchers are especially sweet because once the tears dried up, some would say it symbolized the end of mourning.
• Funeral strippers are just that, exotic dancers who sing and dance while removing their clothes at a funeral or in a procession to a funeral as a way to celebrate the life of the deceased and attract mourners. See! Everyone is afraid nobody will show up to their last party! If strippers can’t bring ’em in — what will, really? The tradition originated in Taiwan and has since spread throughout parts of China. Some say it brings good luck. We’re not experts here, but we’re willing to bet those people are straight men…It seems China has significantly cracked down on this controversial performance, since this little strip tease act is often considered obscene. In fact, they started giving rewards to people back in 2018 to snitch on others for hiring funeral strippers.
• In March 2013, four men in northern China were sentenced to prison for exhuming the corpses of ten women and selling them as ghost brides to the families of deceased, unmarried men. The women’s bodies were to be buried alongside the dead men, ensuring eternal companionship. Guess the saying is true: romance . . . is dead.
• In Sardinia’s past they would allegedly throw their sick elders off certain cliffs. Sometimes senicide would be done by a select group of women named accabbadoras, a.k.a. the terminator or ender. They would bless them and then proceed to either suffocate them, or kill them with blunt-force trauma by hitting them on the back of the head with a wooden mallet.
• In 1888, Alfred Nobel’s brother Ludvig Nobel passed away, but the French newspaper accidentally published an obituary for Alfred — oopsy daisy. The obit referred to Alfred as the “merchant of death” due to his invention of dynamite, which was then being used in warfare. Imagine not only was your obituary mistakenly printed but also . . . they dogged you in it? This incident reportedly had a profound impact on Alfred Nobel, leading him to establish the Nobel Prizes in order to leave a more positive legacy. Mission accomplished. We didn’t even know about the dynamite.
Ultimately: There were fewer “scathing” obituaries than I expected, fewer new and interesting facts (but to be fair, more than none), and nothing really made me laugh, but I did appreciate the aim of demystifying death: there was a section on the “alarming” suicide rates in South Korea and efforts being made (by places such as the Hyowon Healing Center) to offer “living funerals” — in which people can don shrouds and enter a dim room with a coffin in order to meditate on the reality and finality of death — and this actually seems to help these people better embrace life, so a story like that confirms the importance of conversations like those found in this book:
We hope you enjoyed our little romp through death. Our aim was to make you laugh and teach you something new while maybe changing how you see death. It’s a scary topic, one that is hard to comprehend, but learning about it gives us power. We wanted to show that it’s okay to talk about it and that knowledge can help us understand it better.
As a child it would put me in mind of a line of that poem that had been read aloud to us by our poetry-loving Master back in Ontario: “‘In winter I get up at night ,’” he had begun, “‘and dress by yellow candle-light.’” Then came the musical rhythm of poetics, with a onesyllabled final verse that began with the line “‘And does it not seem hard to you?’”
In Winter I Get Up at Night is a beautifully considered and composed history of Canada’s expansion west into the “northern Great Plains”. Jane Urquhart’s writing is fluid and reads effortlessly as her main character, Emer McConnell — a middle-aged itinerant teacher of music, and less frequently, art — goes about her business, driving long stretches from rural classroom to rural classroom, and remembers her own time as a student in one-room schoolhouses (and the imperious Inspector of Schools, and sometimes instructor, who followed her family from Ontario to Saskatchewan), the time she was severely injured in a tornado (and the year she spend recovering on a children’s ward with a colourful group of other patients, doctors, and nursing sisters), and the great love of her life: a famous scientist who would meet the permanently disabled Emer at remote hotels along the railway’s spur lines for years, but who would not agree to be seen with her in public. Exploring imperialism, racism, what women will do for love, and the true history of a people who are not as blameless as we may like to think we are, Urquhart forces us to reevaluate the Canada of the twentieth century through the eyes of a good person mulling over terrible events. It takes the entire novel to tie a bunch of threads together, and while I wasn’t exactly surprised by any of the ultimate revelations, everything does conclude on a satisfying note. I’ve been a longtime fan of Urquhart’s work, and this is a tour de force; rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
My family, whose ancestors had endured the outlawing of their language and religion, the imperial takeover of their land, and the peril of famine, could never free themselves from property hunger. They gobbled up land in Ontario, field by field. Then they sent my father out to feast on the prairies in a similar fashion. All this without giving more than a passing thought to those who had for millennia inhabited the geography my family coveted. One tribe, forced out of its homeland by imperial dominance, war, and scarcity, migrates across the sea and forces another tribe out of its homeland.
My husband had a great uncle who, injured at Vimy Ridge, was granted a large section of land in Saskatchewan and moved out there to ranch after WWI, but I had never before heard, as is written here, that just as in Ireland a family would expect one of their sons to become a priest, an Irish immigrant family in rural Ontario would instruct one of their sons “to go west for the land that was being made available there” at the beginning of the twentieth century (or that relatives with Irish backgrounds would hold an “immigration wake” for family members leaving the province, knowing that they would never see them again). Urquhart mentions the displaced First Nations a few times, but this is really more about the irony (and ugliness) of people who — immigrants to the land themselves — were capable of racism (and even violence) against fellow immigrants who didn’t quite talk, act, or believe in the same God as themselves. As Emer scrolls through her memories, she reveals a lot of the systemic ugliness she grew up with (unremarkable to her at the time), and when she got older, the even uglier ideas she was exposed to from the powerful world in which her famous lover lived.
When I think of the scene now, my legs braided with Harp’s, my head on his arm, speaking about my brother, it seems to come from a country so far away and visited so long ago, no memory can recover its shorelines. Harp’s long body. And that woman who was me, not young, but so much younger than I am now. What of her? How did she manage it all? The man, his body. No one before or after. I was helpless and adrift. He was unknowable. And that meant there wasn’t any part of me that I didn’t want him to understand, to know.
“Harp” is a nickname that Emer gave to her secret lover (an inside joke based on Harpocrates, the Hellenistic god of silence and secrecy), but it eventually becomes clear who this real life man is supposed to be — and that kind of bothered me. Urquhart lists a biography of the man among the “dozens of books and articles related to my subject” that she read in preparation for this novel, but even if he was actually a cad and a playboy (and a racist sympathiser with a fetish for scarred bodies?), something feels off about him being an officially unnamed secondary character in this novel — I’m looking forward to seeing what other readers think about this.
How strange we all are! Most of us come from Irish and Scottish tribes cast out by the mother country. But we are still reading her poems and singing her songs. How odd that we define foreignness as those whose speech hold the trace of another language, and then we ignore altogether our own foreignness on land that was never our own.
I first learned of the Doukhobors (a fascinating people, beloved of Tolstoy, and integral to the storyline) when my own family moved out west in the 1980s; and although their protests and nudity and fire-setting were all very shocking to my young sensibilities, my mother (of pure Irish immigrant background) urged me to open my mind to their beliefs and perspective, so maybe that’s progress? Even so: Urquhart weaves a fascinating story of our little-acknowledged history — with consistently beautiful writing about ugly events — and I am grateful and delighted that this exists.
No-one here will get through life without losing a limb, an eye, a child or a spouse, a piece of flesh, and Éléonore feels the thick, calloused skin of her knees, her elbows, brushing against the fabric of her dress, of her blouse. Even the children seem only to remain children for the blink of an eye. They come into the world like livestock, scrabble in the dust in search of meagre sustenance, and die in miserable solitude. They dance to the sound of a squeaky fiddle to forget that they were dead before they were born, and the alcohol, the music and the sarabande lulls them into a gentle trance, the impression of life.
This multiple award-winning novel by French author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo knocked it out of the park for me. Animalia touches on the lives of five generations of a rural French farming family, and even as that family enters the modern world, removing itself ever further from a harmony with nature, its members become increasingly more brutal and beastly. It’s true that Del Amo was inspired to write this novel after visiting a factory farm (and witnessing horrific animal abuses there), but he has said that Animalia is “a pure work of fiction and not a thesis or activist writing. It is a novel that appears to me to speak more about the human condition than the condition of animals.” A domestic epic, social commentary on the twentieth century, a deep dive into the nature of humanity and how we are formed by our families: this novel has everything that I personally admire in a work of literature. And with compelling characters, explosive sentences (all respect for the translator, Frank Wynne), and consistently wrenching plot points, this is a well-imagined, well-written, and well-constructed novel by any measure. Absolutely highest rating.
We need to scrabble in the mud of memory, the silt of this family tree, to drag into the light of day the roots I’m telling you about, roots as difficult to rip out as broom — and what does it matter now whether the blame lies with me or with others who came before us? I am the one who is here now today prepared to explain, to answer for our actions. Not that I am expecting absolution, not that I expect your forgiveness or even your compassions, but simply because it is the least I can do: to try, always assuming it is possible, to piece together the story, our story, and therefore yours, for you, who has not asked anything and yet whose life and whose actions are guided by some invisible hand — why not call it fate, since everything had been decided for you — to try to reconstruct that collective memory, instilled in each of us and yet elusive and illusory.
As Animalia begins, Éléonore is a five year old girl, living on a subsistence farm with her cold, severe mother and a hard-working father (with whom she hasn’t exchanged a hundred words in her entire life, but adores all the same); Éléonore doesn’t understand that her father is wasting slowly from a disease of the lungs. Éléonore does her chores obediently — enjoys taking the brood sow into the forest to snuffle for acorns — and the chores follow the rhythm of the seasons, in harmony with nature, year after year. Her father eventually brings a slightly older cousin, Marcel, to help him work the farm — naturally, a crush ensues — and the story to this point could have been set at any time over the past many centuries until one day Éléonore and Marcel look up and marvel at the aeroplanes and airships passing overhead. Soon, Marcel is conscripted into WWI and the news that Éléonore hears from the front is of the inhuman industrialised horrorshow that combat has become, and this anticipates what the family’s farm will eventually turn into.
In the second half, set in 1981, Éléonore is the detached and sidelined matriarch of the family, with her son and two adult grandsons running a large-scale “piggery”; and while the operation looks modern and efficient, farmwork is as back-breaking as ever (with the unending feeding, assisted breeding, and the sluicing out of excreta discharged by thousands of confined hogs), but now totally disconnected from the natural rhythms of the land and its seasons. You can see habits and quirks passed down through the generations, but a propensity for violence and a failure to communicate are this family’s true patrimony. Even so: Éléonore has a mute great-grandson — aloof to the influences of the hard men and disengaged women around him — who still delights, as she once did, in walking in the woods; in being one with nature. The storyline truly does feel epic and it comes to a realistic ending, with a satisfyingly supported thesis:
This coldness, this hard-won indifference to the animals, has never quite managed to stifle in Joël a confused loathing that cannot be put into words, the impression — and, as he grew, the conviction — that there is a glitch: one in which pig rearing is at the heart of some much greater disturbance beyond his comprehension, like some machine that is unpredictable, out of kilter, by its nature uncontrollable, whose misaligned cogs are crushing them, spilling out into their lives, beyond their borders; the piggery as the cradle of their barbarism and that of the whole world.
This is a book with a lot of charged material in it — abuses, war, bodily wastes, alcoholism, mental illness — but nothing is gratuitous and it is all written in brain-firing, incandescent prose: this is what we have become as humans and we do well to acknowledge it.
I'll add here: I read this because I recently finished an ARC of Del Amo's upcoming release (The Son of Man), and the two books seem very related; they certainly cover the same theme of violence being passed down within families. And I want to note that I had a problem with the formaility of the language in The Son of Man, but didn't have the same problem for this book, maybe because of the historical setting? I especially didn't like the use of the word "genetrix" in that book (it seemed a pointless synonym for an unnamed mother), but it is used well in Animalia to describe Éléonore's severe mother (and especially as she is eventually renamed "the widow" and then "the grandmother" as her circumstances change.) All this to say: I would have appreciated The Son of Man even better had I read Animalia first and recognised its place in a body of work (I know there's something to that novel having a family property called "Les Roches" and the family farm here being named "Les Plaines"; perhaps there are more books to the series.)
When I think back to my time in Ashiya, the day Mina showed me her boxes of matchboxes stands out as the day she really took me into her confidence. Of course, we’d been on good terms before then, but the boxes of boxes opened the final door to our friendship. I was the only one among her friends or family who knew her secret. In that enormous house in Ashiya, she and I were the only ones who knew what was hidden away in those little boxes.
A beautiful coming of age story — set in 1972 suburban Japan — Mina’s Matchbox follows two cousins as they bond over first loves, literature, and a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko. Translated from the Japanese original, there’s a slightly stiff formality to the writing, but author Yōko Ogawa paints a vivid picture of the time and place, and by the novel’s end, I felt totally immersed and emotionally invested. Ogawa captures something true and universal about this transitional time of life and I believed everything she writes about the long-term effects of childhood experiences, family ties, and being disappointed by the ones we most admire. I loved this, rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Whenever I return there in my memory, their voices are as lively as ever, their smiling faces full of warmth. Grandmother Rosa, seated before the makeup mirror she brought from Germany as part of her trousseau, carefully rubbing her face with beauty cream. My aunt in the smoking room, tirelessly hunting for typographical errors. My uncle, impeccably dressed, even at home, endlessly tossing off his quips and jokes. The staff, Yoneda-san and Kobayashi-san, working hard in their respective domains; the family pet, Pochiko, relaxing in the garden. And my cousin Mina reading a book. We always knew when she was about from the rustling of the box of matches she kept in her pocket. The matchboxes were her precious possessions, her talismans.
Looking back thirty years later, Tomoko remembers fondly the year that she spent living with her maternal aunt’s family (as Tomoko’s widowed mother upgraded her own education in Tokyo). Tomoko remembers her initial surprise at just how large and luxurious their family home was, how handsome and charming her uncle, and how frail and beautiful her cousin, Mina: one year younger but years ahead in knowledge and sophistication. Mina’s paternal grandmother had been born in Germany, and it added a fascinating dimension to have this ageing and elegant character — still somewhat struggling to speak and read Japanese after forty years in the country — who completely accepted (the technically unrelated Tomoko) into her heart, and whose closest friend is the family housekeeper, Yoneda-san (the pair harmonise beautifully when singing duets in both German and Japanese). It was also interesting to watch the girls excitedly follow the Japanese national men’s volleyball team as they prepared for the Munich Olympics — with the German grandmother happily cheering on both the Japanese and German teams — and then seeing the Black September terrorist attack play out (and learn that, having moved to Japan in the 1930s, the grandmother was the only member of her family to survive WWII). Also interesting: the hippopotamus was the only surviving animal from a zoo that Mina’s grandfather had opened on their property (the zoo becoming another victim of WWII), and everything about the pre- and post-war experience of this German-Japanese family was intriguing to me. All of this, and more, is just what’s going on in the background as Tomoko and Mina undergo an intense year of friendship: sharing new experiences, sharing secrets, and Tomoko eventually learning that a big house doesn’t guarantee a happy home.
With the passage of time, even as the distance has increased, the memories of the days I spent with Mina in Ashiya have grown more vivid and dense, have taken root deep in my heart. You might even say they’ve become the very foundation of my memory. The matchboxes from Mina, my card from the Ashiya Public Library, the family photo taken in the garden — they’re always with me. On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars. I remember that Sunday adventure, when I went alone to the Fressy factory, received a matchbox from a batlike man, and found the Ezaka Royal Mansion. And when I recall those things, I feel somehow that the past is still alive, still watching over me.
The strongest point that Ogawa makes is how impressionable we are at that transitional time into the teenage years, and the experiences and influences we have during that period can build the foundations of who we eventually become. Looking back thirty years later, Tomoko shows where these seeds were planted in her own life, and I thought the whole was pulled off with a deft and subtle touch. Loved it; I will need to get to The Memory Police.
The expression “tits up” is American showbiz slang for an upbeat attitude, often used as a positive send-off from one woman to another. “Tits up” reminds a woman to stand up, pull her shoulders back, and flourish. It’s a cheer that reassures a sister that she will succeed.
Sarah Thornton is a sociologist and ethnographer, and when breast cancer forced her to have a double mastectomy — and she didn’t think twice about having breast implants as part of her reconstructive surgery — she received blowback from her feminist friends that she was caving to the pressures of the patriarchy. Being a lesbian and a public feminist herself, Thornton was in a unique position to self-interrogate on just why she wanted the implants, and as an author who has made a career of writing on art and culture, she went out into the field to investigate those whose work centres on women’s breasts: sex workers, milk bank donors, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and in a bit of a stretch thematically (but intriguing to read about), pagan/witchy women who bare their breasts ritually. In Tits Up, Thornton approaches each experience with curiosity and impartiality, and from lapdancers to lactation consultants, she treats everyone she encounters with dignity and genuine interest. From the fascinating facts to the engaging writing style, I loved everything about this; four and a half stars, perkily rounded up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Tits Up explores beauty, health, respect, self-esteem, self-determination, humanness, and equality. I hope to shed light on breasts in ways that elevate their value, not just because I believe in some happy, shiny body positivity, but because these organs are emblematic of womanhood. Put another way, I have no doubt that the status of breasts — not to mention tits, titties, jugs, racks, and apexes — is integral to women’s social position. For as long as breasts are disparaged as silly boobs, we will remain the “second sex.”
I’ll start by stating that my sense of the title is closer to the British usage: “In Britain, ‘tits up’ means something has gone ‘belly up,’ like a lifeless fish floating in water”, but I do appreciate Thornton’s more positive usage (and she does suggest that the American showbiz slang might be an ironic flip of the original, like “break a leg”). Thornton starts her investigation in a strip club, and along the way interviews a variety of sex workers (which she calls an “umbrella term” that includes strippers, sensual masseuses, porn [film/online/phone] actors, sexual surrogates, professional sugar babies, dominatrices, karaoke hostesses [domis]; even Hooters waitresses, cheerleaders, and perhaps, wives], and concludes:
Strippers, as professional manipulators of male desire, are acutely aware of the dynamics of patriarchy. Sitting here, I’ve come to respect their position on the frontline, observing their shrewd navigation of the global gender war. In the past, I might have assumed that they pandered to patriarchy, but I’ve come to see this perspective as prudish and thoughtlessly classist.
Thornton’s ultimate conclusion on this type of work — as a feminist and as a cultural commentator — is that the state needs to stop policing sex work, “If some women can’t sell their bodies, then none of us actually own our bodies.” Thornton turns her attention to milk banks — interviewing those who donate surplus breast milk, those who buy it, and those who run the milk banks — and she discovers a lot about differing global attitudes to breastfeeding (Norway is the world leader, France is culturally opposed [one French woman even had her doctor advise her to stop breastfeeding after eight months because, “Your breasts belong to your husband”], and the USA is somewhere in the middle, with African-Americans least likely to breastfeed [likely a holdover from when enslaved women were forced to wetnurse]), all of which I found fascinating:
Most of the “breast is best” conversation has focused on the benefits of breastfeeding for infants, as if the health of mothers were irrelevant — a phenomenon that a militant might dub medical misogyny but which I prefer to call patriarchal obliviousness.
A final note on the American situation: the WIC (food stamps program) is the world’s largest purchaser of powdered infant formula, and Thornton writes that the WIC program is weirdly administered by the USDA instead of Health and Human Services, quoting the director of Mothers’ Milk Bank in Austin, Texas as explaining,“(It’s) because WIC is a US dairy farmers’ subsidization program. Do you think it’s their mission to improve community public health by having more breastfed children? No, they say a whole lot of things, but their mission is to make sure that the bovine industry is alive and well in the USA.” Interesting. Moving on to plastic surgery, Thornton observes as a woman has her implants removed and her remaining breast tissue repaired, and has a fascinating interview with her surgeon. We learn that more trans men than trans women have “top surgery” (likely because the first is covered by insurance while the second isn’t), most women who have a mastectomy opt for implants (again: covered by insurance, so most don’t think too hard about the alternative), and as the majority of plastic surgeons are men, they tend to recommend large implants with 1960’s-era Playboy cartoon upturned nipples (the woman surgeon that Thornton is watching even describes conferences at which the male surgeons still joke about asking men if they want to go up a cup size while their wives are already under sedation. Har har.) But although Thornton appreciates the misogynistic overtones of breast implants, she concludes:
While most feminists have seen beauty as a form of submission, others have argued that it is a means of resistance. I think the binary logic of this “structure versus agency” debate is a dead end because the problem is not an either-or. The pursuit of beauty can be both a form of obedience and an effort to subvert and surmount. I read a compelling article by critic Rita Felski, arguing that feminists need to craft thicker descriptions of aesthetic experience so we can balance the political costs of being beautiful with the emotional benefits. Only then can we do justice to the reasons why humans pursue and take solace in beauty.
I didn’t take much away from the section on bra designers (other than the evolving history of women’s “intimates” that still keep us covered, and controlled, more than men), and while the final section at the Fool’s Journey pagan restorative retreat did make for interesting reading, it’s tangential to the topic at best:
Through being here and researching the place of breasts in spirituality, I have come to understand that there is no necessary opposition between feminism and religion. Women’s emancipation is not exclusively secular. In fact, our liberation may be enhanced by flights of fancy and leaps of faith.
Naturally, there’s a lot more information in Tit’s Up than can be included here, but I want to reiterate that this is a very pleasing and pleasant read. It makes a good companion piece to a book I read last year — Butts: A Backstory, on the history of male attraction to the female behind — and as with that book, I think it’s important to stop every now and then and interrogate the culture we’re living in: we may find ourselves in a time of hyperfixation on and sexualization of breasts, but that has not been the case across global cultures and throughout human history. So when a socially acute woman like Thornton makes the decision to include breast implants as a part of her post-mastectomy reconstruction — despite being very aware of the counteracting pressures put upon her by the patriarchy and her sisterhood of feminist friends — we ought to acknowledge, even celebrate, what that decision meant to her own sense of self and mental well-being:
When I observe women who relish their cleavage, I am delighted by their good fortune. Breasts and chests are the literal front and center of body positivity.
While the chorus of “Bella ciao” played over and over again, the movement became rhythmic. At first it just wobbled, heating, until it got much hotter than the rest of me, until finally it was blazing and spinning inside my body. And then I understood at once. It was the coin. I had no doubt about it, I just knew. I had put it there when I was little, in the car ride down south. For more than two decades the coin was gone, I didn’t know where it was. And then, for some reason in New York, it was resurrected.
Yasmin Zaher is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian journalist and The Coin is her first novel: and it absolutely knocked me off my feet. The main character — a young Palestinian woman: rich and beautiful, newly arrived in NYC to work as a private middle school English teacher (even though she hasn’t read any of the English classics), physically and existentially stateless — is not outwardly a victim of history looking for sympathy. And yet she suffers bizarre, body-based obsessions, and as her actions approach a breakdown, it’s obvious that, despite outward appearances, trauma (both personal and historical) underpin and affect her entire existence. I have never experienced anything like this novel — I don’t believe I have read a book written by a Palestinian author before — and this exposure to other lives and voices is exactly the reason why I read. This might be a bit challenging for those who like bodies to remain sanitised and out of sight, but this is a novel I would urge everyone to read; and especially at this time. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser, followed by toner. All imported from Korea, the world capital of skin like porcelain, purity, and nothingness. Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face. Then, after drinking a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of lukewarm water, and a cup of coffee, I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire. All out, insides clean.
A trust fund orphan (with her brother administering her inheritance back home), the unnamed main character has a strict cleaning and beauty regime, wears a capsule wardrobe of designer clothes (all in black), drinks Chivas, enjoys several lovers, and never goes anywhere without the vintage Birkin handbag (size 35) that she inherited from her mother. The publisher’s blurb explains that this is about her time teaching “with eccentric methods” at a school for underprivileged boys, and how she “gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags”, and while these are the plot points that keep the novel rolling along, this is so much more about what’s happening inside this young woman and what she wants to share about her thoughts and background with the reader; and that often gets political:
• To be honest with you, in New York I saw the dirtiest people I had ever seen, although I’d never been to a third world country. I came from Palestine, which was neither a country nor the third world, it was its own thing, and the women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.
• When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster, the rich want to look poor.
• It was reported that fifty-five people were killed in Gaza, and I felt a pinch in my chest. But when I looked up at the trees, at the sky, I saw that nothing was changed.
From the presence of the titular coin — a shekel the main character swallowed as a child, which she never knowingly passed, and which she now suspects has lodged itself beneath the skin between her shoulder blades, which she can’t quite reach with her Turkish loofah — to a back-to-nature mania that her breakdown leads to, this is very much about this woman’s body (which is, I suppose, the singular homeland of a stateless person), and the writing about this body is discomfiting, explicitly sensual, and illuminating. The following scene — in which the woman walks naked in the woods outside NYC, while on a trip with her lover Sasha, and is frightened by a deer — seems to hold the key to the whole thing:
I come from a land that is a graveyard. For millennia, all kinds of people were born there, they died there, or were killed, and some were even resurrected or reborn. It was bloody, haunted, and doomed, but it belonged to mankind. Nature in America was uncivilized and untamed. I didn’t know how to read it. If a deer was some kind of warning sign, I wouldn’t have known. Before Sasha could see him, the deer turned around and left. I saw his fluffy white tail behind him, like the tail of a rabbit, and all my fear turned into giddiness. Sasha didn’t leave the house to look for the deer, he stayed indoors, keeping a distance from nature. He was a complex man, but you have to understand that everything outside of me only serves a function. Yes, I am a good woman, I respect people, I listen to their voices. Yours too. But this is not Bakhtin’s carnival, this is a centralized nervous system.
That last line was so intriguing to me that I had to look into “Bakhtin’s carnival” and learned (here) that this refers to the theory of Carnivalesque/Rabelasian “writing that depicts the de-stabilization or reversal of power structures…by mobilizing humour, satire, and grotesquery in all its forms, but especially if it has to do with the body and bodily functions…often read as a utopian antidote to repressive forms of power everywhere and a celebration of the possibility for affirmative change, however transitory in nature.” So while I have read and enjoyed Rabelais, and appreciate that form of satire as protest, it feels like a post-modern update for Zaher to explicitly write that this is not Baktin’s carnival, “this is a centralized nervous system”: this is real life, a real trauma-informed breakdown, and I see no reason why Zaher can’t both hearken to the carnivalesque (as a literary tradition) and repudiate it (as a personal experience). I absolutely loved everything about this novel — this is a voice, in both tone and particular POV, that I have never before encountered — and I hope The Coin is read widely upon its release. Full stars, no hesitation.
“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,” Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.” Go looking for hopeful climate stories and they turn up everywhere.
H is for Hope is like a picture book for adults, with twenty-six essays written by noted science writer Elizabeth Kolbert— accompanied by charming illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook — one for each letter of the alphabet (which sounds like the topics could be cutesy or strained, but they’re really not), and the core message really is about hope. Kolbert makes the case that action is needed on climate change (several of these essays are blunt about the challenges we’re facing), but she also writes about all of the wonderful projects (electrification, “green” concrete, opportunities for large developing economies like India’s to “leapfrog” over fossil fuel use straight to more sustainable energy sources) that are currently taking place, and hopefulness is the point (under N for Narratives, Kolbert stresses that we need to be careful how we discuss climate change: “A diet of bad news leads to paralysis, which yields yet more bad news”, yet, “People who believe in a brighter future are more likely to put in the effort required to achieve it.”) As I read a digital ARC, I’d be very interested to see what a physical copy of this book would look like — it will be shelved in Science and Nature alongside Kolbert’s other books, but will this be more like a graphic novel? A coffee table book? — and as much as I did enjoy reading this, I’m left bemused as to who might buy a copy. (Usual warning that, as I read an ARC, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Kolbert begins at A for Svante Arrhenius (who first proposed the link between carbon dioxide and climate change in 1894; he imagined that living under “a warmer sky” would be delightful, but probably 3000 years in the future):
It’s easy now to poke fun at Arrhenius for his sunniness. The doubling threshold could be reached within decades, and the results of this are apt to be disastrous. But who among us is really any different? Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it.
And ends the essay collection at Z for Zero (with a discussion of the Hoover Dam, ground “zero” for climate change in the US, the construction of which was authorised in 1928, just a year after Svante Arrhenius’ death) and I didn’t previously know that the Colorado River has been experiencing a “megadrought” since 1998:
From the observation deck, the drought’s effects were scarily apparent. An abandoned dock lay, in pieces, high above the lake’s edge. Instead of being submerged, the power plant’s four intake towers stuck up in the air, like lighthouses. The steep walls of the reservoir, which in pre-dam days formed Black Canyon, were lined in an enormous black stripe — a geological oddity known as the bathtub ring. The ring, composed of minerals deposited by the retreating waters, runs as straight as a ruler, mile after mile. At the start of the drought, the stripe was as high as a giraffe. By 2015, it had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In 2022, it reached the height of the Tower of Pisa. The water level was so low that the dam's generators could operate only sporadically.
And along the way, there are many hopeful bits, as here with J for Jobs:
Recently, a Princeton-based team issued a report detailing how the United States could reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050. The researchers considered several possible decarbonization “pathways”. The one labelled “high electrification” would, they projected, eliminate sixty-two thousand jobs in the coal industry and four hundred thousand in the natural-gas sector. But it was expected to produce nearly eight hundred thousand jobs in construction, more than seven hundred thousand in the solar industry, and more than a million in upgrading the grid.
I like the idea of spreading a hopeful message — it can only help to combat paralysing fatalism — so maybe the point is to have books like this, with bite-sized info, laying around for people to flip through and get inspired. It can’t hurt.
Something inside the boy crumbles, a hesitancy, a fear, and he surrenders to the car’s movements, surreptitiously seeks to make contact with the father, to touch him through the leather jacket in a tentative, clumsy attempt to convey his affection — or what he considers the affection expected of a son for his father, of a child for this man, this stranger who, out of the blue, has been designated his father.
I read The Son of Man in a new English translation (the French original was released in 2021), and while author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo has much to say about the universal human condition (and in particular, the relationships between fathers and sons going back to the dawn of man), I found there was something slightly lost in translation between this story set in recentish (it seems before cell phones and internet) rural France and where I find myself today. Still: I found myself very invested in the modern day timeline (whose heart wouldn’t go out to a nine year old boy meeting his dangerous father for the first time?), and while I didn’t find the plot to be exactly surprising, I thought that the storytelling was very compelling and flowed logically to prove the point that Del Amo appeared to be making about what fathers can’t help but pass down to their sons. This touched me, heart and mind, and I can’t ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages might not be in their final forms.)
The leader stops, looks up at the sky and, for an instant, the black disc of his pupil aligns with the white disc of the sun, the star sears the retina and the creature crawling through the matricial mud turns away to contemplate the valley through which he is trudging with others of his kind: a landscape whipped by winds, sparse undergrowth dotted here and there with shrubs that have a mournful air; over this bleak terrain floats the negative afterimage of the day star, a black moon suspended on the horizon.
This opening paragraph — and the scene that follows, with a group of primitive hunters (including a father and adolescent son with “eyes that are deeply sunken in sockets chiselled beneath the prominent brow ridge”) on a deer hunt — made me think, “Whoa, I didn’t know I was reading a book set in prehistory.” But after a deer is taken, the narrative goes from “The young hunter bends down and picks up his spear” and shifts, within a paragraph, to: “In the backseat of the battered old estate car, the son is dozing.” Del Amo plays with the timeline throughout — we first meet this family (father, mother, and son) as they drive towards some unnamed destination, and then rewind to the father suddenly (creepily) inserting himself into the mother and son’s happy lives — and it takes the entire novel of shifting around in the timeline to answer all of the questions that this setup presents. This format was really well done.
As it turns out, this reunited family is making their way towards the incredibly remote mountain property named Les Roches (which sounds impressive but it’s a dilapidated barn conversion) where the father was raised by his own possessive, grief-ridden, paranoid single father; and as the trio tramps up the mountain at night, overburdened with the backpacks the man has assigned to them, the questions keep coming, and Del Amo eventually answers them all. This is, at heart, a story of a nearly feral, antisocial man who suddenly decides to assert parental rights over a sensitive boy who had been raised by a very young, well-meaning, loving single mother; and not only does Del Amo demonstrate how the father’s worst traits were learned from his own father, but situations between the father and son chime right back to the dawn of man (including the solar eclipse described in that last passage.) The theme is impressively supported by the plot.
A note on the translation: there was a weird formality to some of the language that sometimes made me wonder if the translator (Frank Wynne) was really capturing the sense, instead of the literal translation, of Del Amo’s writing; would a reader of the original have needed to look up definitions as they encountered that original primitive band of people described as a “tatterdemalion herd”, or when “the tarpaulin inflates and crumples with the rustle of an elytron”, or perhaps most egregiously, “The crabbed flesh of her genetrix was always forced into severe skirts that never came above her knee.” (That last can almost be forgiven because, as Del Amo never gives formal names to his characters, there are only so many ways to say “the woman” or “the mother”, but an English writer would never use “genetrix”.) I found it distracting.
There are other stars, he says, other planets, some so dark that no sun ever reaches them, and beyond that, there are other galaxies, thousands of them, and each galaxy contains billions of suns, billions of planets, and beyond everything that is visible, he says, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
“Are there other earths like ours?”
“I hope not,” says the father after a prolonged silence. “I hope there’s nothing. Nothing but rock, silence, ice and fire.”
There’s a lot of pain and drama in this story, but it doesn’t come from nowhere; Del Amo held my attention throughout and totally nailed the landing. Recommended!
Alone, we had become the lies he had told us. Together, we were learning to unravel it. We were building the chain. We were learning to replace him with ourselves.
In January of 2017, after leaving the clinic room in which she had taken the first dose of the abortifacient that her boyfriend had talked her into, Chimene Suleyman discovered that this boyfriend — the love of her life — was never who she thought he was, and now he was gone; leaving nothing behind but a text telling her that she was now ruined and unworthy of love. Suleyman would eventually learn that this man (never named) similarly ruined the lives of dozens of other women — defrauding some of them of tens of thousands of dollars — and by growing a mutually supportive community with these other victims, Suleyman was able to eventually find a place of healing from which to examine the persistent systems of misogyny that allow men like this to escape consequences. The Chain tells Suleyman’s story (as well as some details from other women’s relationships with this man), examines how society celebrates the playboy (while denigrating the women who get played), and concludes that women (and especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement) can find the power to fight back against this type of toxic masculinity when they band together, share their stories, and support one another. The details of Suleyman’s story are shocking and compelling, but it’s the thoughtful social commentary that makes this an elevated read. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I reached for my keys, but put them away. I turned the handle on my apartment door and expected, rightly, that it would open. The shirts he left in my closet were no longer there. His T-shirts that had filled the bottom drawer, gone. His sneakers that had formed a neat line against my shoes, and some of my belongings too, gone with him. No one should love me. And I believed him. Because I had been taught to.
There’s a lot going on in this memoir: Suleyman is of Turkish Muslim heritage (not white but “white-passing”; what this boyfriend called “sandy”) and had emigrated to America from the Britain she was raised in. Suffering from Depression, a recent breakup, and other pressures from feeling isolated in NYC, Suleyman was a perfect target for this man who liked to lovebomb new girlfriends and then beg understanding for his own mental health challenges (claiming to have been diagnosed with Agoraphobia and Autism); what started as fun and exciting became this man needing to be taken care of, and if the woman had money, he’d clean her out for supposed stays in mental health care facilities or travel money to get to the big job that would allow him to pay her back. He accidentally-on-purpose got more than one woman pregnant (and talked them into abortions that not all of them wanted), he made a habit of taking pictures of his girlfriends sleeping nude without their consent (sometimes sharing them in a group chat with his buddies), and he routinely disappeared when the fun stopped. As a stand-up comedian, a lot of his material was about how dumb women are (four nights before her abortion, Suleyman thought that her boyfriend was sitting with his mother in Atlanta as she was dying, but he was actually in NYC doing a set about how much he hates Muslims), and it was a revelation for Suleyman to watch YouTube videos of his standup routines, in the aftermath of their breakup, and hear men in the audience guffawing at the most unfunny misogynist lines:
Comedy is an invisibility cloak for the men who hate women. It’s not objectification, it’s social commentary! It’s not chauvinism, I’m in character! It’s not a rape joke, it’s intellectual critique! It’s not bullying, it’s risqué! It’s not harassment, it’s banter! It’s not a slur, it’s a play on words! “Good” comedy is meant to push boundaries, meant to shock, meant to provoke. If you don’t like it, maybe you’re too sensitive, too literal, maybe you’re just not smart enough to get it.
Suleyman makes the point that while we might be shocked by the extent of the abuses committed by the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein, popular entertainers like R. Kelly (in the lyrics of his songs) and Jimmy Savile (in countless interviews) told people exactly who they were and what they got up to, and the world just sang and laughed along (as underage victims of sexual abuse were silenced by this apparent cultural acceptance of their experience). Suleyman discusses quite a few male celebrities, and while I think it’s fair to examine the abuses of Bill Cosby and Louis CK (and maybe to a lesser extent, allegations made against Aziz Ansari), I don’t know if it is fair to lump Robert Downey Jr and Mark Wahlberg in with Chris Brown as similarly forgiven for past crimes (or to list celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon, Johnny Cash and Russel Brand as all using the depression they suffered as an excuse for the women in their lives to clean up the chaos they created). It all makes the larger point, however, that when we excuse celebrities of their bad behaviour, we are setting a standard for how the unfamous are treated: many of the boyfriend’s buddies were disgusted when they found out that he had taken these women for so much money, but Suleyman demands to know why they weren’t similarly disgusted by how he used their bodies. The antidote, according to Suleyman, is for women to get loud, tell their stories, and join together; if men, and the society they continue to dominate, don't care about the mistreatment of women, women need to focus on caring for each other:
There is no singular experience of womanhood and we create the chain to remind ourselves of this. We stand beside each other in such a way that we may say, Tell me your story as a woman, and yours, and yours, and yours. I do not know what it is to be a Jewish woman, a Black woman, or trans, or gay, or disabled, or a sex worker, or a prisoner, or a pilot, or a seamstress, or four husbands deep (yet). Where I fall in our flawed verses of womanhood is that I am unlucky in some ways and fortunate in others. What we share is history. What we share is the need to talk, to say we made it or we didn’t. Survival isn’t enough and it musn’t be.
Overall, a compelling read. If I had a complaint: I don’t mind that Suleyman chose not to name the boyfriend, but I didn’t like that every “he, him, or his” she used to refer to him was italicised (I was mentally emphasising the word every time, and it became distracting), and similarly, she italicised “the chain” every time as well, and that felt cutesy and disempowering. Small complaints, good read.
Mauro sprang to his feet as we approached and congratulated us on finding the restaurant. I’m afraid the others might not solve the riddle so quickly, he said. It’s typical of this city’s attitude to fashion, he said, that the most desirable meeting place should also be impossible to find. Not so impossible, Julia observed, since they found it. It’s the parade that has confused everything.
Obviously, Rachel Cusk is smarter and more sophisticated than I am, and despite the fact that I am always struck by how wonderfully constructed her sentences are, I’ve only ever given one of her novels (Second Place) more than three stars: the wonderful sentences stack up and up into something that whooshes right over my head. Because Parade is primarily about art and artists, I’ll use the analogy that I much prefer Impressionism to Realism (in both painting and literature), and while I might appreciate elements of Abstract art on an intellectual level, it doesn’t speak to my soul; and what Cusk is doing in her work to “disturb and define the novel” strikes me as closest to the Abstract. This novel that reads like a series of essays or vignettes — a shifting parade of artists, all named “G” — repeats themes of doubling and mirroring, death and violence, having children and losing parents, and it all seems to add up to a commentary on gender and artmaking — and I say “seems” because coming right out with a point seems to be beside the point (which is not a fatal flaw, just hard for me to connect with). As an intellectual exercise, I am enlarged for having picked this up, but when it comes down to taste, this isn’t exactly my thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive, and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.
Cusk has written before about having been “brained” by a strange woman in Paris, and Parade would seem to be an expansion (in themes and format) of the short story she had based on that event, “The Stuntman”. Rotating between third person accounts of various artists (G the painter whose style evolved into painting upside-down landscapes, prompting a female novelist to lament, “G was not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.” — or G the sculptor who made amorphous figures out of fabric, “It seemed to lie within the power of this G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.” — or the Black artist G, “By painting a small picture of a cathedral, G appeared to be making a comment about marginality. In the eye of this beholder, the grandiosity of man was thwarted: his products could be no bigger than he was himself .”) and various first person accounts (of everyday life and travel and family demands), this is more about the artists’ common humanity than what they created. (Many of the artists who appear, despite all be named “G” in the novel, are identifiable as real people by their work, but masking their identities seems to be in keeping with Cusk’s attempts to write herself, as the author, out of her novels). There is no overall plot, but the episodes recounted reinforce themes of gender disparity, artistic vision, and family dynamics. Again: Cusk has much to say and her sentences are masterful —
• Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way as they committed violence – to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need.
• Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word.
• Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness.
• Psychologists tell us that little children are proud of their own shit, and enjoy showing it to other people, until they are informed that their shit is disgusting and should be hidden, and I suddenly wondered whether artists somehow never got this message and kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.
• A woman artist marries a male artist because she sees her ambitions mirrored in him. She thinks that because he’s an artist he’ll let her be an artist – she thinks he’s the one guy who will understand her. But a male artist wants a slave, and when he marries a woman artist he gets the bonus of a slave who thinks he’s a genius.
Two of the artists that Cusk writes about seem to be achieving in their preferred media the “effaced narrator” that Cusk strives for in her writing. There is the painter, G: “She painted a number of big oils that showed a seamless, almost featureless surface, quietly undulating like the surface of the sea. They seemed to hang mutely and pacifically between death and life. They proposed something non-human, a spiritual quest.” And the film-maker, G:
His style, so uninterfering, drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. For those accustomed to the camera’s penetration of social and physical boundaries and the strange authority of its prying eye, this absence of what might be called leadership was noticeable. People were often baffled or even angered by his films. They expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it.
These two creations (an “almost featureless” painting and a film without a narrative that deepens the ambiguity of reality) are fairly analogous to how I perceived the construction of the “almost featureless” Parade — and that may very well be genius and genre-defining, but personally, I need more there there; whoosh, right over my head.
