Last year was a difficult one, but there were at least 40 up sides: debut authors, with fresh voices and viewpoints, whose work offered us perspective or escape. As the calendar turns over, the problems we faced last year still linger, but a new group of writers are set to introduce their work to readers across the globe.
Whether you’re seeking a revealing memoir about family secrets or a short story collection about women all named Sarah, the first half of 2021 offers something new for everyone.
Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel is about a forbidden romantic relationship between two Black men enslaved on a Mississipi plantation during the Antebellum. Jones explores queerness through a new lens that has rarely been explored in literature. The Prophets is one of the most powerful Black queer historical novels ever written.
Torrey Peters’s first full-length novel is about searching for connection and family while navigating the challenges of gender. Ames thought detransitioning would give him a happy, unremarkable life, but it may have wrecked his relationship. His partner Reese wants a child, but doesn’t know how to have the family with Ames that she envisioned with Amy. The result is a domestic drama filled with tangled lives for modern times.
A decade after leaving Argentina, a man returns home under less-than-ideal circumstances: the first woman he loved is dying. His return isn’t a rosy homecoming, but one where he must confront the ghosts of his past while grappling with the man he has become in America.
Set in present-day Los Angeles and a 1990s British boarding school, Ellie Eaton’s book carefully examines the destructive relationships of teenage girls. At the center is Josephine, a freelance writer who was one of the private school’s biggest bullies. Revisiting the shuttered school in her 30s, she begins to dig into her own past and grapple with the decisions she made decades ago.
In her debut memoir, Nadia Owusu invites readers into her globe-spanning childhood and young adulthood. After her mother abandoned her as a toddler, Owusu’s father, a U.N. official, brought his children and his new wife from continent to continent, until his death when the author was 13. This memoir follows her to Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, London, Kampala, New York, and elsewhere as she comes to term with her family tragedies and her own identity.
After her mother dies during alcohol treatment, Geller returns to the Florida Navajo reservation where she grew up and finds a suitcase packed with photos, diaries, letters, and personal ephemera. Using her experience as a librarian and archivist, Geller digs into her family history, mixingher own narrative with the story she derives from her mother’s documents.
Throughout these sublime stories, Dantiel W. Moniz explores love and loss with grace. The stories center on Floridian women and girls trying to find their place in the world—from a teenager resisting her restrictive church to two sisters transporting their father’s ashes.
Just after the 2016 election, a woman’s relationship falls apart when she discovers her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist. Her own truths and beliefs begin to unravel after she flees to Berlin and catches herself becoming more secretive and manipulative with those around her.
Te-Ping Chen’s story collection is an expansive look at modern China, as it struggles with the influence of the past and envisions a new future. Chen offers both realism and magical realism throughout the collection, which allows her to tackle her vision of Chinese culture with both clear-eyed practicality and dreamlike allegory—for instance, a strange new fruit that brings on troubling memories of the Cultural Revolution when eaten.
Novelist David Tromblay’s debut memoir investigates his relationship with his alcoholic father, and the long shadow cast on his family by the boarding schools in which Native American children like his grandmother were indoctrinated and abused. He explores his family legacy of anger and trauma to figure out how he survived to become the man he is.
Sebastian Mote is a 35-year-old gay high school teacher who just wants to settle down and have kids and maybe a white picket fence. Why is that so hard? At a wedding, he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham, also a proud gay man, who dismisses Sebastian’s yearnings for a marriage and babies as heteronormative. Oscar is upset at the rise of bachelorette parties at gay bars and the mainstreaming of queer culture. Sebastian and Oscar are both attracted and repelled by each other’s life choices, both struggling to find their place and to envision a meaningful future for themselves. Set in the weeks after the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Let’s Get Back to the Party is an insightful novel about what it means to be a gay man in a rapidly-changing America.
Jakob Guanzon’s novel follows a down-in-their-luck father and son who are evicted from their trailer and living in a truck. Abundance takes a critical and unsentimental look at the harsh effects of poverty in a country that’s seemingly teeming with abundance.
A brother and sister come together in their childhood home after their mother passes away to pack things up and move on with their lives. The brother is on a self-destructive path and the sister tries everything in her power to save him, including coming up with a bet that may save his life.
The Recent East is a multigenerational story that starts with a family who escapes East Germany for upstate New York. After the Berlin Wall falls, their daughter Beate Haas is told that she can reclaim her parents’ abandoned house in their hometown of Kritzhagen.
In this essay collection, for readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jia Tolentino, Jesse McCarthy covers topics ranging from trap music to Kehinde Wiley’s paintings. Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? highlights his keen eye as he observes the intersection between art, race, literature, and politics.
“Beware their ambition, their ugliness, their insatiable hunger, their ferocious rage.”What does it mean to be a monstrous woman? To be a woman who is too ambitious, too hungry, too angry, too ugly to fit into the societal norms dictated by our patriarchal society? In her book, Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman analyzes feminism through eleven female monsters from Greek legends to build a new mythology: one where the hero is a monstrous woman with power and agency.
Sarahland is a queer experimental reimagining of selfhood; nearly every story in this collection is about a woman named Sarah. Sam Cohen tackles so much in this wide ranging book of Sarah origin stories, as one Sarah plays dead for a wealthy necrophiliac while another uses her Buffy fan-fiction to process her emotions.
Set mainly in present-day Miami, Gabriela Garcia’s novel is about Carmen who harbors ghosts from her past and her daughter Jeanette who is struggling with addiction. The two make decisions—including taking in the daughter of a neighbor who was detained by ICE—that begin to tear their relationship apart. Their relationship implodes when Jeanette travels to Cuba and learns unforgivable truths about her mother from her grandmother who stayed behind.
Pitched as The Glass Castle meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this Southern memoir follows J. Nicole Jones as she grows up in a family that swings from extreme wealth to extreme poverty in South Carolina. On the outside, their family is perfect, but behind closed doors, violence and anger erupt.
The sudden death of two teenagers reverberates through a small town in Washington State. The mystery deepens with the arrival of a pregnant 16-year-old stranger who might be the key in solving what happened.
A multigenerational novel that spans decades and continents, The Parted Earth looks at how the Partition of India and Pakistan left an indelible mark on three generations of women. Enjeti crafts a compelling story about the search to uncover ancestral secrets and the quest for belonging.
In their satire about social media, Alex McElroy provides a darkly humorous dissection into public personas. The novel follows a failed social media influencer and a struggling actor who create The Atmosphere, a cult-like rehabilitation center for toxic white men hoping for absolution. However, like their careers, things don’t go as planned and take a turn for the worse almost immediately.
We all have mythologies that we build around our parents. Lilly Dancyger (editor of the anthology Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger)worshiped her father Joe, a brilliant East Village sculptor in the grip of a heroin addiction. After her father’s sudden death when she was a young girl, Lilly becomes self-destructive. Years later, she uses his artwork to reexamine the mythology she built about her father and to understand who exactly was Joe Schactman.
Zakiya Dalila Harris tackles #PublishingSoWhite in her novel about two Black women working in book publishing. Editorial assistant Nella, the only Black employee at Wagner Books, is thrilled at the prospect of finally having a kinship with a fellow Black colleague when Hazel is hired and becomes her cubicle-mate. But not long after Hazel’s arrival, threatening notes start appearing on Nella’s desk.
In this introspective Hong Kong-Canadian novel about grieving and difficult familial relationships, an unnamed narrator examines the ramifications of growing up in an “astronaut” family with a father who stayed in Hong Kong as a breadwinner while his wife and children moved permanently to Canada.
Bewilderness follows Irene and Lucy, coworkers in a pool hall in rural North Carolina. The two young women, already magnetically attracted to each other, form a bond after an impulsive plot to exact revenge on a customer who was being a creep to them. Their codependent friendship intensifies over the highs of popping opioid pills and scamming drug dealers to fuel their growing addiction. But what happens when the person who has been enabling your addiction wants to get clean and leaves you behind?
Struggling playwright Jonah Keller is living in a shitty Bushwick apartment and barely getting by on his menial restaurant pay. Buteverything seems finally to be going his way after Jonah carefully crafts a “chance” meeting with a Pulitzer prize-winning writer so he can further his ambitions. As their torrid affair spills over into the summer in the Hamptons, Jonah begins to notice all might not be what it seems with his older lover. The predator quickly becomes the prey in this tense page-turner. A riveting queer novel, Yes, Daddy takes a critical look at the way power imbalances play out in relationships.
Translating novels, short stories, and poetry into English in a way that remains true to their original form can take years, even decades of dedication. And then there is the job of persuading the Anglophone publishing world to take chances. Translators’ labor is ultimately rewarding for readers who are able to embark on these previously-unknown literary journeys.
The second part of our list of contemporary translators features award-winning translators who are also novelists and poets, who work from Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Portuguese, and Bulgarian to English, and one who renders contemporary American literature into Japanese. I spoke to them about the anti-imperialism of translation acts, the numerical abundance (also the economic precarity) of BIPOC translators, and the joys and challenges of translating swearing and grammar that doesn’t exist in English.
Don Mee Choi: Korean to English
Seoul-born Korean American poet Don Mee Choi includes translations of South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, and her recent book, Autobiography of a Death. Choi’s radiant and supremely-thoughtful (references include Walter Benjamin, Ingmar Bergman, Korean shamanism, and her own personal history) in her treatise, Translation Is a Mode=Translation Is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode, certainly will have you considering language, translation, and life in general, from a different perspective. Choi’s own collection of poetry DMZ Colony won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.
On non-poets being translators of poetry: “Reading translation is an extension of translation. It’s an opportunity for poets and non-poets to practice curiosity and dislodge themselves from whatever cultural greatness they were taught to believe in. So reading translation is about not making things great again. It’s an anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist act. Therefore, I think translation is always possible.”
Translating a chain letter: “I pretended to write in English when I was a little child because I thought that my father was a foreigner. There is a poem about this in my collection, Hardly War. I was convinced that my father had to be a foreigner because I never saw him more than a few times a year. As a war photojournalist, he was in Vietnam and other war zones. I wanted to know the language he spoke outside of South Korea. After we moved to Hong Kong, I couldn’t play piano anymore, so I played with my father’s typewriter instead. One day, I received a chain letter in English—this was popular way back when—and I typed all 91 letters. When my mom asked me what I was typing, I translated the letter to her, overly exaggerating that something terrible might happen to my father if I didn’t type all the letters. My father is almost 91 this year. I can’t take credit for it, but I can’t help wondering.”
Madhu H. Kaza: Telugu to English
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, New York City-based Madhu H. Kaza’s translated works include stories by the feminist writers Volga and Vimala Devi. She edited Aster(ix) Journal’sKitchen Table Translation, a wondrous investigation of the pathways of translation and migration. The volume features John Keene, Teju Cole, Don Mee Choi, and many others. In her terrific introductory essay, Kaza writes:
“For me, with all its predicaments, all the violence it may carry on its back, translation is an act of hospitality. Hospitality, conceived not as charity, not as condescension or even merely tolerance. A hospitality that recognizes both the dignity and the difference of the other.”
An early act of translation: “There’s a big difference in my relation to the words mamidikaya and mango, which are equivalent. When I arrived in the U.S. as a child I kept asking my mom for mamidikaya and finally in exasperation—because these fruit were not available anywhere in Michigan at the time—she presented me with a round, red, mealy item and said, “Here, this is an apple-mango.” I can’t tell you how furiously I hated apples into my adulthood. The word ‘mango’ was also ruined for me.”
On the challenges that face BIPOC translators: “It took me more than 20 years from my first attempt to learn to read Telugu to the time when I began translating Telugu fiction. One reason it took so long is that I never had access to any institutional support for this work, and working on Telugu was never my primary occupation. I take translation seriously, but it’s still very much a small side project for me. Of course, we need much more support for emerging BIPOC translators and translators working in under-represented languages, but I’m wary of most diversity efforts, well-intentioned as they are. We need people to get together and think deeply about this, and not get self-congratulatory about adding one new diversity mentorship to their ongoing programs. We need to think about how mentorships can be more dynamic and less isolating for the mentees. I was talking with the wonderful translator Katrina Dodson about the idea of creating a retreat for BIPOC translators, a gathering where people could build community, share ideas and resources, discuss translation, and, crucially, also be given some time to do their own work. If someone wants to offer space and fund such a project, I’m here. BIPOC translators are here and we have so many more ideas about this.”
Meena Kandasamy: Tamil to English
To her renaissance woman resume, which includes poet, novelist, and activist, Meena Kandasamy added her first translated book in 2020, the Tamil language novel, Women Dreaming by Salma. Her translation wish list includes Malathi Maithri’s poems (“definitely want to do them before I turn 40”) and the novelists Sivakami and Bama. (“my dream will come true if I translate a novel each from them”). She’s hoping to finish her decade-long labor of translating the love poetry in the classic Tamil text, the Thirukkural in 2020.
Story-crafting in English and Tamil: “English is my second language, so when I write in English I do labor twice as hard, but sometimes, the hard work involved itself adds to the artistic dimension. I am much more fussy and exacting because I want to choose the precise word in a second language, I pay far more attention to how it sounds off the page because the rhythms of my ears are still attuned to Tamil almost as a reflect. I personally think I’m more successful writing in English than if I were in Tamil because it allows me to be twice removed—once as a writer (standing outside, writing in), and secondly as someone very conscious that this is not her mother-tongue. There is a sense of strangeness that remains, and that perhaps makes all my English writing very much my own.”
On swearing: “I loved the women swearing. It is a very Tamil thing—women might appear very pious, religious but when you rub them the wrong way, you hear things come out of their mouths that will shock you. I kept feeling—will the English reader get this? So, there’d be a character who will implore Allah, and say, ‘Allah why don’t you punish this cunt-son?’ The extreme religiosity marries so easily with coarse profanity.”
Natascha Bruce: Chinese to English
Natascha Bruce studied Chinese at Cambridge but only started taking translation seriously when she entered a Chinese translation competition while working for an NGO in Jerusalem. Soon after, she moved with her partner to Hong Kong, where she met Chinese-language writers, read their works, and began her career as a translator of Chinese novels. She is currently working on Dorothy Tse’s first novel, Owlish and the Music-Box Ballerina, and her other translated works include Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong and Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngo. Bruce, who now lives in Chile, says she has “a meaningful relationship with Chinese, Italian and Spanish, although these relationships are wildly different to one another.”
On the cultural specificities of translating Malaysian Chinese: “I’ve only been to Malaysia twice: once to Genting Highlands when I was doing research for my translation of Yeng Pway Ngon’s Lonely Face, and once to visit Sok Fong in Kampar while I was translating Lake Like a Mirror. Sok Fong introduced me to her cats, took me around her local pasar (market), showed me the coffee shops where she goes to write, read my palm, described the different places she had been while writing thestories, told me about books she liked. At the start of the project, I worried constantly about not having access to the specific cadences of Malaysian English, and about upsetting the careful balance of Sok Fong’s stories by not even knowing what I didn’t know about their context. As I came to know Sok Fong, though, and felt a deepening intimacy with her and her writing, I had a growing confidence that I could trust my responses to the words she had put on the page.”
On Hong Kong’s trilingual protest slangs: “In the past year I’ve been awed by the ingenuity of Hong Kong protest slang—the way protesters have shifted between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English to adapt to new restrictions, using the enforced trilingualism of Hong Kong to their advantage. They’re merging characters to create totally new ones, appropriating police insults, making extensive use of homophones both within and across languages, playing on the different pronunciations of characters in Cantonese and Mandarin, often all at once. The speed, the adaptability, the mixture of playfulness and defiance, the bravery: it’s phenomenal.”
Izidora Angel: Bulgarian to English
Chicago-based Izidora Angel’s next book is Nataliya Deleva’s debut Four Minutes. Her first effort was Hristo Karastoyanov’s The Same Night Awaits Us All. Her next fairy godmother-ing adventure (which includes playing agent, PR person, social media guru, grant writer, and branding expert) is Yordanka Beleva’s Keder (“some of the most beautiful, heartbreaking and almost magical writing to come out of Bulgaria in the last few years.”). Check out one of her storiespublished in the Los Angeles Review. Angel is the co-founder of The Third Coast Translators Collective.
The “Inferential Mood” in Bulgarian: “This is what I love and loathe about translating the Bulgarian. It’s got these crazy 37 moods and tenses. Can you imagine studying this? So really the richness of the tongue is all in the grammar, in the way a verb is conjugated to relay so much potency. The inferential mood alleges something has happened while acknowledging that the teller of the event was not there to witness the event, so… did it actually happen? It’s the perfect gossip tense! Honestly, Bulgarian newspapers get away with murder by employing it. On the whole, though, the inferential mood demonstrates how analytical and uniquely structured the Bulgarian is and this tense is, naturally, impossible to render into English. In English, you can say ‘allegedly’ a couple of times but that’s too burdensome to employ for the duration of a novel, so you have to choose: did it or did it not happen—and run with it.”
On the fight against erasure: “I’ve found that the collective’s mission ebbs and flows with the times. We may have come together as language artists looking to create community, but lately, we’ve zeroed in on some pretty serious battles: the massive underrepresentation of women in translation, the erasure of the translator from the very work they have translated, the ghastly financial conditions we work under, the preservation and protection of endangered and Indigenous languages.
Next time you read a review of a novel in translation in a mainstream outlet, see how long it is before the translator is even named, and count how many words are used to review the actual translation. This is what I mean when I say it is a tooth and nail fight to combat our erasure. It is somehow presumed that a translator churns out a text word by word. Outlets like TheNew York Times are really leaving half the story on the table when they dedicate zero space and intellectual curiosity to who reverse-engineered the novel and put it back together and how. Of course, doing this would inevitably shake up their reviewer shortlist.”
Katrina Dodson: Portuguese to English
When Katrina Dodson returned from her first trip to Brazil in 2002, she began learning Portuguese by listening to cassettes on her Walkman. Her experience of Brazil, especially of its music, was so expansive that she wanted to share the country’s many faces by becoming a translator. Dodson is the translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories, she also speaks (and studied) her mother’s ancestral tongue, Vietnamese, and teaches translation at Columbia University.
Katrina Dodson in Vietnamese vs. Katrina Dodson in Brazilian Portuguese: “It’s a source of anguish and something of a mystery to me that my life trajectory has led to a point where I can sometimes pass as Brazilian—with no family relationship to the country—whereas I speak Vietnamese like a child. My Brazilian persona is brighter and more open than my American self, with bigger hand gestures, probably in part because I love speaking Portuguese, so it automatically puts me in a better mood. Plus, there’s this element of escaping the same old self I grew up with, so it makes things lighter; the language is less saturated by time.
In Vietnamese, I feel so small and tentative, always worried that someone won’t understand the words I’m struggling to pronounce or will start laughing at me (like my relatives), or even worse, start talking so fast that I can’t understand. I grew up hearing Vietnamese and actually studied it in college and spent a semester living with a family in Hanoi, but the language is so different from English, with six tones, so I lose it quickly when I don’t practice.
It’s funny, being a heritage speaker should in some ways embolden you to reclaim your roots, but for me, every time I make a mistake in Vietnamese, it reminds me that I’m only half, and that I didn’t grow up speaking it with both parents at home. When I say something wrong in Portuguese, it’s just a momentary lapse in my performance without any heavier consequences for my sense of identity. Reading Vietnamese American writers like Vi Khi Nao and Ocean Vuong brings up a lot of memories and sensory associations for me, and their bold imaginations inspire me to reshape my relationship to Vietnamese.”
Translating a Brazilian classic:“Macunaíma is about as far from The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispectoras you can get, in many ways, so I am very curious to see who will get excited about Mário de Andrade’s 1928 modernist classic. Lispector is a master of conjuring emotional landscapes and complex psychological states, and readers can dive into her writing without any awareness of Brazilian culture or history. Andrade’s experimental novel, on the other hand, is something of a Brazilian national epic that weaves together a patchwork portrait of Brazil based on an encyclopedic array of sources, including Indigenous myths, rural folktales, Afro-Brazilian syncretic religious practices, and Iberian troubadour ballads. As with epic and folklore, there’s no interiority—it’s all episodic action, and the complexity lies in the novel’s inventive language, as well as in Andrade’s recasting of collective storytelling in this roving narrative about the trickster hero Macunaíma.
Translating Macunaíma has led me to completely reinvent my approach to translation, especially in considering what is untranslatable, in part because the book mixes various regional forms of spoken Brazilian—as opposed to written Portuguese—with dizzying lists of flora and fauna in Tupi, the major Indigenous language, as well as words from other Indigenous languages and Bantu languages. There’s a common misconception that translating means making everything comprehensible, but the best works of literature often produce deliberate ambiguity and sometimes outright illegibility. So in determining which non-Portuguese words to leave in the original, I think about the music of these list poems that conjure the abundance of the Amazon rainforest, the ethos of using local, non-European naming conventions for the natural world in the Americas, as well as which non-Portuguese phrases function as incantations or bridges back to certain histories that would lose their power if I substituted them with words in English.”
Aoko Matsuda: English to Japanese
While all the translators on this list deliver books from the world’s many languages into English, Aoko Matsuda translates English books into Japanese. She has translated works by contemporary American writers such as Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado. In addition to her translation work, Matsuda is also a fiction writer. Her latest short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton, is a feminist reimagining of classic Japanese ghost stories.
Reading the English translation of her book: “One thing I learned by being translated is that the act of translating is not a one-way process. It’s always an interaction, and even when we don’t actually communicate during their process of translating, I can see that interaction from their texts afterwards, and see how they understand me and my stories. The feeling when I read them is electrifying.”
The popularity of American literature in Japan: “It is not easy to come up with a name of a contemporary American writer who is as famous in Japan as Murakami is in the U.S., but the publishers and translators in Japan have always been passionate about introducing the works of American writers, as well as the works of the contemporary writers of other countries. There are a certain number of Japanese book lovers who are especially fond of foreign literature, and they always look forward to reading the books of newly introduced writers. One thing I love about Japanese readers is that they empathize and love the strange and compelling stories written by the contemporary American female writers, like Miranda July, Kelly Link, and all of the writers I’ve translated.”
Hannah Cryan waited in the Transit van up in the Curlews. Setanta Bromell had parked so that the van was secreted in the shade of the Forestry pines and could not easily be seen from the road. He had taken the dirtbike from the back of the van then and headed down to Castlebaldwin pissing smoke. His morning’s ambition was to rob the petrol station there with a claw hammer. Setanta was her fiancé of these recent times and, despite it all, the word still rolled glamorously to her lips.
It was the second Monday of May. She was a little more than four months pregnant. The whitethorn blossom was decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch’s wedding. Already the morning was humid and warm, and snaps of wind cut from the hillsides and sent the blossom everywhere in vague, drifting clouds. Even with the windows shut, her eyes streamed, and she could feel sore pulses in her throat like slow, angry worms. Setanta was thirty-two years old to her seventeen and it was not long at all since he had been her mother’s fiancé.
That’s the way it goes sometimes with close-knit families, he said.
Don’t even fucken joke about it, she said.
Setanta’s plan—if it could be held up to the light as such—was to get into the petrol station just after it opened, show the claw hammer and start roaring out of himself. As she waited on the mountain, Hannah jawed helplessly on her gums and tapped her phone for the time—it showed 7:17 a.m. and then died.
Fuckwad, she said, and threw the phone to the dash.
Castlebaldwin was a ten-minute scramble away and he’d been gone for more than twice that. The van had laboured to climb even the low mountains of the Curlews and she tried not to think deeply about its viability for escape. The drone from the N4 down below was becoming more steady, the morning traffic thickening to a stream. It was difficult to believe that just last night she had laughed with excitement as she took the first baby bump photo for her Insta and Setanta’s needle buzzed jauntily as he tattooed a lizard on his left calf. He told her in a voice scratchy with emotion that he loved her and that their souls were made of the same kind of stuff. She licked his earlobe and showed him the selfie and he cried in hard, gulpy jags. She did not remark that the lizard looked more like it had frog dimensions, really, nor that the rapid blinking effect had returned to Setanta’s left eye.
She had asked him to leave the keys of the van but he would not. When he had a plan worked out his mouth fixed into a tight hard rim like a steel toecap. In truth, she knew well that Setanta Bromell of Frenchpark was not making solid decisions lately. She sneezed and reflexively laid a hand to her belly to reassure the visitor. High slants of sunlight now breached the top of the Forestry pines and showed a stretch of scarred hillside rising to Aghanagh bog. The gorse on the higher hills was lit from the inside out an electric living yellow. Dead for half a year the Curlews were like some casual miracle reviving. Setanta Bromell said that May, always, was the number one month of the year for going mad.
Passing through the narrow kitchen of her mother’s house, four and a half months previously, he had placed a hand to her skinny hip and turned on the cow eyes and that was enough. Her mother when she’d been drinking slept like the dead. By night, it had become the custom that Setanta and Hannah would talk. She liked to listen to his stories about work. He told her about the man with the huge swastika on his back that Setanta had remodelled into the ancient flag that showed in quadrants the symbols of the four proud provinces of Ireland: the red hand, the triple crown, the hawk and dagger, the harp.
Better a ‘Ra head than a Nazi, he said.
There was a quick russety shimmer athrough the yellow gorse as a fox moved for her den. Hannah’s lip moved softly at the sight and made a wordless murmuring. Now the birds were going dipshit unseen in the hedges, in the pines. Setanta Bromell owed her mother, like, four grand? His eyes rolled up as if to see the stars when he came.
She waited. The Transit van smelled like a stale morning mouth. She listened for the growls of the dirtbike climbing the backroad but no sound rose above the birds, above the N4’s sea-like drone, above the hot wind in gusty snaps from the hillside.
Her hands lay folded loosely across her belly. She tried to do what the lady doctor at the clinic had told her to do in the panic times—she felt out her breaths on an individual basis. You had to get yourself on intimate terms with every breath that passed through your body. You had to listen to each breath as it travelled and smooth out its journey. In the Transit she sat and concentrated as well as she could but still her breaths came short and wildly.
Now the sunlight broke fully across the canopy of pines and came starkly through the van. Hannah closed her eyes against it to see dreamy pink fields on the back of her lids. She clawed at the greasy vinyl of the seat. She listened, and in the gaps between the wind it was just the birds in conference, in the high springtime excitedly, a vast and unpredictable family.
Still on the air there was not a whisper of Setanta Bromell’s dirtbike.
He did not drink much. She’d say that for him. He would sit up late while her mother slept. For a long while, they had sat at opposite ends of the L-shaped sofa, as far apart from each other as they could get, which in itself had signaled a situation. He said that particular stretches of ground had for him a lucky vibration. He said the Curlews most of all. Once a prime buck had skittered from the ditch and lurched into the side of the van and dropped stone dead of the shock and all Setanta had to do was haul it home and hang it to be skinned.
These are the type days I get in the Curlews all the time, he said.
He spoke often of fatedness and of meant-to-be’s. Then came the 3 a.m. of his soft, slow hand in the kitchen, and it was a case of smoochy-smoochy and throwing each other up against the walls before anyone knew the fuck what was going on.
She pulled down the sun visor for its mirror. She had a face on her like a scorched budgie. She detested her new self. By nature like a stick, she was taking on weight with the pregnancy. Beneath her breath, she made the words of a Taylor Swift song for distraction but the song did not take.
News headline: there was no sign of Setanta Bromell on no fucking dirtbike.
She saw him with his limbs splayed on the petrol station floor. She heard the ratchety cruel tightening of the cuffs. Or maybe the Belarussian who worked the morning shift had just hopped the counter and grabbed the hammer and laid Setanta out flat with a single bop to the broadside of the head. The Belarussian was a massive fuck who must have weighed about as much as a cement mixer. Setanta’s plan had gaps and weak spots.
Hannah Cryan climbed from the van and walked from the Forestry pines onto the backroad. By now the morning had clouded over and the vast spread of the whitethorn blossom across the hillsides and the high fields and the ditches made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind. Once, as a child, she had been slapped across the face by her mother for bringing an armful of the blossom into the house. The whitethorn flowers so much as passing the threshold was a harbinger of certain death in the family. By about the Tuesday of the next week. She had meant it as a gift for her lovely young mother.
As she sat on a five-bar gate up in the Curlew mountains the great meanness of the morning descended on her. She hummed a string of four or five notes against the meanness, not knowing where they came from nor how.
The plan was that they would drive through the day and the north to the ferry at Larne for Stranraer, and from there descend through Scotland and the Borders— she watched his lips move as he recited solemnly the steps of it—through Cumbria to Yorkshire and to his cousins in the city of Wakefield. Over the nights, as they conspired, the word “Wakefield” had taken on the burnish of legend. She saw the city lights spread out. She imagined a child with a North of England accent and a neat little flat in a tower block. She saw herself and Setanta in the bed eating toast and taking photos of each other—his muscles flexed; her eyelashes fitted— and the toddler gurgling along in pure happiness on the rug on the floor. Setanta Bromell might soften his cough in Wakefield, she believed, and think harder about his decisions, and forget all the nonsense with the lizards and the claw hammers.
The day was up and about itself. The fields trembled.
Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.
Her mother had found her one careless morning under the throw on the sofa, topless and asleep in the hot, emotional clutches of Setanta Bromell. That had made it a morning for the annals. Since then, they had slept in two sleeping bags zipped together at his King Ink studio. The studio was located over a butcher’s shop in Boyle. It reeked of their wild love and animal death. Setanta was 18 months behind on the rent and had a notice to quit and lately this involuntary blinking in the left eye.
But desperate times, he said, very often turned out to be disguised opportunities.
Wakefield, as a shimmering prospect, was held aloft before her like a priest’s chalice.
By now she knew that he would not come back from Castlebaldwin. On the five-bar gate of a tiny farm high in the Curlew mountains she again closed her eyes for the pink fields. She went into a dream. If the moment was never-ending it might not even exist. She felt the presence of something very old and uncaring on the air. An insect’s steady keening from the ditch was incessant like a hopeless prayer or the workings of his needle. He had tattooed on her inner thigh a swallow in flight.
In the black times make you think of summer, he said.
In the black times, she thought, it’d take more than a badly-drawn swallow aiming for my fucken gash.
He was probably in the holding cell at Ballymote already. He was already on first name terms with every guard in the vicinity. Setanta Bromell was—and here the words came unbidden, as if from an old ballad recalled—already in chains. The new life within twitched with nervous expectancy. As if it knew already of all the disasters to come.
Hannah Cryan came to ascend from herself. Above the green fields and the whitethorn blossom moving in the morning wind, above the stone walls and the Forestry pines, above the inland sea of the grasses, above the broken drone of the motorway, above all of this she measured out the stretch of her seventeen years. They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it. Her man in jail and a child at the breast—it was all playing out by the chorus and verse.
Her legs weak, her step uncertain, feeling lightheaded and frightful, she trailed back to the van and climbed into it. She sucked the last warm dregs from a bottle of water on the dash but her thirst was not sated. Often he kept six-packs of sparkling water from Aldi in back of the van. For his digestion, he said, which was at the best of times troublesome.
They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it.
She got out and opened the back doors and rooted around among her fiancé’s astonishing detritus. She found no water but she did find the ten euro claw hammer from Simons Brothers hardware.
The scales of the morning fell away.
She stood by the side of the van with the claw in her hand.
She swung it hard and precisely to extract the eyes from the brute, lying face of Setanta Bromell. That the sockets might dangle and his lively tongue loll.
She hadn’t the strength to climb back in the van. She sat on the ground on the pine kernels and cried for a short while. A few months ago she had been skin and flint and edges and points—she had been hard—but now she was softened and plush like a lazy old cat. It was foreign to her. She felt slowed and mawkish with it. He had softened her merely with glances, his touch and words. More than softened, she had been opened.
On the mountain time loosened, unspooled. The fields blinked.
The gorse whispered. Morning?
It must have been coming by now for noon. If she had the legs to carry her, they might take her the five miles down to Boyle. But if she did not get past this moment, she would not have to face the next.
She looked out across the high fields. Just now as the cloudbank shifted to let the sun break through the whitethorn blossom was tipping; the strange vibrancy of its bloom would not tomorrow be so ghostly nor at the same time so vivid; by tacit agreement with our mountain the year already was turning. The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that old burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the old tune’s circle and turn—it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.
Now she heard before its sound even broke on the air the scratch and meek resolve of her mother’s Corolla. It was neither taxed nor insured. It was taken out only at moments of high emergency. These were not yet so few as her poor mother might have hoped.
And yes, here it came, inevitably, around the bend from the backroad into the Forestry pines, and Hannah felt a volley of tiny kicks within.
Lou-Lou Cryan was a hollowed woman now. She was like a reed from the drink and the nerves. She stepped from the Corolla and came soft-footed and stoically through the gloom of the pine trees to take her daughter in her arms.
Oh you poor fool, she said. Oh you poor sweet fucking fool.
The grand master put a brass collar around the new member’s neck, a symbol for dogs’ servitude towards their masters. Taking the new member by the right hand, he guided them around a designated area nine times. Thus the new initiate joined the Order of the Pug, a secret society of Freemasons in Germany who celebrated and acted like the ugly-cute scrunch-faced dogs.
While pugs are known for their loyalty, the Order of the Pug was started as a rebellion against authority, specifically the Catholic Church. In 1738, Pope Clement XII banned Roman Catholics from participating in Freemasonry and other secret societies following an inquisition into this practice. Shortly after, Archbishop Clemens August of Bavaria formed the Order of the Pug with other dedicated Freemasons and would-be initiates, allegedly including two German princes. The Order of the Pug was a direct rebuke to Pope Clement XII’s prohibition: it was a Freemason-associated secret society that you had to be Roman Catholic to join.
But the Order of the Pug only lasted around ten years, less than the average lifespan of the real dogs. This is likely due to the publication of the French bookL’Ordre des francs-maçons trahi et le secret des Mopses révélé (1745)—“The order of the betrayed Freemasons and the secret of the pug revealed.” The exposé, written by Catholic abbot Gabriel-Louis-Calabre Pérau, detailed the Order’s pug-related traditions and its flouting of Catholic law. Pérau never fulfilled his goal of becoming a priest; perhaps the tell-all was his way of currying favor with the Church.
A woman being inducted into the Order of the Pug
Whether you are a dog person or a cat person, the Order of the Pug’s practices, as described in Le secret des Mopses révélé, come across as very weird. Pérau, who learned about the Order of the Pug while researching the subject of Freemasonry, described the rituals in detail. Even before wearing a brass collar, people interested in joining the Order of the Pug would have to “scratch, as dogs do,” the door three times, and if there was no response, they would “start scratching more.” The grand masters were also referred to as the Grand Mopse at these ceremonies, which translates to Grand or Great Pug.
Strange practices aside, not just anyone could join the Order of the Pug, even if they were down to wear brass collars in front of a group of people. There were rules, and they mostly had to do with a member’s personality. According to Pérau’s exposé, Order of the Pug members had to have the following characteristics: “Loyalty, Trust, Discretion, Tenderness, Sweetness, Humanity; in a word, all the qualities that are the basis of love and friendship.” Basically, to be a part of the Order of the Pug, you had to have many qualities of a pug. If those interested in the Order of the Pug failed to perform the rituals or did not have the character of a dog, they were kicked out of the building before the festivities began. Pérau also reported that the Pugs claimed to be thumbless, like their dog namesakes; what might look like a thumb was in fact “a little finger.”
Unsurprisingly, the initiation ceremony and reception featured glass pug statues, which were also depicted in the illustrations of Pérau’s exposé. Pérau wrote that a pug statue was placed at the table of the master of the lodge where the ceremony was held, as a “symbol of society.” At this table, there was also a sword and a toilet. The sword’s placement at the table was logical: Freemasons have long used swords in ceremonies. But the inclusion of a toilet was a bit strange. Not even Pérau seemed to be able to make sense of it.
To be a part of the Order of the Pug, you had to have many qualities of a pug.
While the Order of the Pug tried to embrace both Catholicism and Freemasonry, their practices seemed to conflict with both. Unlike most Masonic groups in the 18th century, the Order of the Pug allowed women to become members. As people become Pugs during the initiation ceremony, instead of calling everyone Brothers—a norm in some Freemason groups—the Pugs referred to new members as Brothers and Sisters. At the reception, men and women sat together based on their position in the secret society’s hierarchy. Pérau wrote that the seating arrangements “alternated between a man and a woman” until the table was full.
At the end of the night, the group always pledged secrecy, promising that they would “never discover, nor verbally, nor by sign, nor by writing, their secrets, and their mysteries”—although some of them must have broken this promise, since Pérau was able to learn details about the Order’s practices. When L’Ordre des francs-maçons trahi et le secret des Mopses révélé was released in 1745, the Order of the Pug was all but finished.
When L’Ordre des francs-maçons trahi et le secret des Mopses révélé was released in 1745, the Order of the Pug was all but finished.
The fact that Pérau’s exposé was able to end a secret society speaks to the power that the Catholic Church had in Europe in the 18th century. Did the Pugs die out so quickly after the book’s release because of the weird practices of Order of the Pug members—or because their practices violated, by design, the rules of an authoritarian leader? The former Pugs faced punishment, like excommunication from the Church, if the Pope decided that was appropriate. Unlike Freemasonry, which had existed since the fourteenth century, the new Pug-centered secret society had no competing authority to offer its members—it only had the thrill of secrecy, which the book destroyed. What the church said was true must be true, what it said was shocking must be shocking, what it said was unacceptable must be destroyed. Today, when any group can create its own authority, one book could never take down the Order of the Pug—they would just turn to Facebook groups and YouTube videos, and probably grow.
To the public of 18th century Europe, though, it did not matter whether or not Pérau’s reporting was entirely accurate; what mattered was that the Pugs’ actions were so shocking and a violation of the Catholic Church. The Order of the Pug fell because people trusted – with the faith of a pug – that Pérau told the truth.
The last thing I did on my last day in the office, March 11, was try to figure out which books to bring home. I wasn’t sure how long we would be closed, but I reasoned that it was at least a week or two. Which of the dozens of books piled up on my desk would keep me entertained without overloading my tote bag on that last walk home?
I brought home three or four. I didn’t read any of them. I also didn’t read any of the books I had at home already. As stores closed, I made some supporting orders from indie bookshops, then didn’t read the books when they were delivered. My schedule was thrown off—I had previously spent every lunch hour reading, but now my lunch hours were the same as every other hour. More than that, though, I simply couldn’t gather my mental skirts up to get anything done.
It wasn’t that I didn’t try. I opened some books, but my attention beaded up on the page and slid off, like rain on siding. But also, it must be admitted that I didn’t try especially hard. The very concept of reading seemed out of step with the crisis we were living through—too pleasurable, too cozy, too optimistic. Bleary-eyed TV binges and grim, rote pursuit of Animal Crossing bugs felt more in sync with the world.
I could only manage to read if I was tunneling away from the world.
The first book I got all the way through was Charmed Life, the first of Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomancinovels, which I’d bought (the whole seven-book series, in three paperback bricks) from one of those threatened indie stores. The second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth were the rest of the Chrestomancibooks. This was possible only because they were lightweight, fantastical, and pitched for children. Sitting down to read still felt like a grotesque parody of normalcy, but once I started, the actual content was a welcome escape—a parallel realm with other parallel realms inside it, all of them laced with magic. I could only manage to read if I was tunneling away from the world.
At this same time, other people were plowing through Station Elevenand The Plague, out of ghoulishness or masochism or a desire for some kind of homeopathic inoculation to horror, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the people who actually used their previous commute time to read books instead of staring dead-eyed at Two Dots. Reading the Chrestomanci series jiggled enough stones loose in my mind that I could get reading done when I had to, and I started making my way through some audiobooks on the traditional pandemic Stupid Little Walks, but I never even got close to my pre-March capacity. Even genuinely fun reads like Wow, No Thank Youspent weeks sitting fallow on, and sometimes under, the coffee table. Every piece of bad news felt like a heavy new weight pierced through the surprisingly tender flesh of my brain. Who can make use of something so shot through with holes?
For someone who has never had any distinctive skills beyond reading and writing, this was a real knock to my self-concept and self-esteem—not least as it became clearer, towards the end of the year, that SOME people had maintained a locomotive momentum of literacy even over nine bleak months. But the low-level hum of anxiety this year, though often drowned out by larger and louder griefs, has vibrated down more edifices than we may realize. Vox just rounded up all the physical changes this year has wrought on those who stayed otherwise healthy: our hair is falling out, our periods are weird, our skin absolutely sucks. Should it even be remarkable if sustained reading is beyond the capacity of our stress-blurred brains?
Reading reduces stress levels—there’s scientific evidence for that. But stress levels also reduce reading.
Reading reduces stress levels—there’s scientific evidence for that. But stress levels also reduce reading. Anxiety ruins your focus, wipes out your short-term memory, makes you thick-headed, makes you jittery. You can’t keep track of who’s who or what they said or what it means. Stress, maybe especially the kind of stress we’ve all been going through where everything seems like the end of the world, also wrecks your equanimity and sense of proportion: being unable to read, if you’d previously thought of yourself as a reader, makes you feel monstrously guilty for what seems, to your addled brain, like a towering failure. You can’t read, so you are ashamed, so you can’t read, so you are ashamed.
Which is why it feels important to say this: there’s a viral pandemic and a corresponding economic crash, the wounds of racism are being reopened or made visible to people who once had the privilege to ignore them, an amoral kakistocracy is attempting a desperate flailing coup, capitalist exploitation of workers is proceeding with cruel indifference to all of the above, and it’s okay if this made it hard for you to sit down with a good book.
I got through two novels this past week, my first time finishing anything at even that modest pace since those Chrestomanci books (which, again, are for children). Eventually, little green shoots start to poke through the blackened underbrush, no matter how big the fire. But you wouldn’t expect a productive, functioning orchard right away. It’s all right if it takes a little while for the scorched earth to bear fruit.
Maybe you could read this year, in which case, good for you—do a Twitter thread about it or something. If you couldn’t, though, listen: it’s fine. It’s fine even if you used to read a lot, even if you grew up marked out as The One Who Reads, even if you aren’t sure what your identity is without reading. Books will be back for you, like one of those old friends where all the old jokes and habits and intimacies bubble up within minutes of seeing them even when you haven’t talked for years.
Until then: it’s Christmas in Animal Crossing. Get cracking.
If every crosswalk is an equals sign,
then every block’s an equation
that needs balancing. On Kansas City’s
State Line Road, the median
divides one whole state from another:
this side’s Missouri and that one’s Kansas.
Want proof? You’ll find two Starbucks
kitty-corner, each with different taxes.
K & M have variable trash theories, too:
apparently Kansas takes anything
so Missourians pile up their wagons and head west
with mildewy fridges and gullied mattresses
to dump. It’s All-American math, writ large:
we add and subtract, we go forth and multiply,
we divide and conquer, we raise and raze
and remodel. The signs are everywhere
on a street that zips up miles and miles
of mom and pop shops, that connects country
clubs and cattle country. We show our work
so proudly. But what about the woman
in rags stumbling along the median?
Can you tell me what state she’s in?
How will we divine the answer?
Skin-Deep
I spied the snake in the middle of shedding:
its former jacket half-attached,
baking and blanching like a corn husk
in August, almost to bone-white.
I got to wondering what it had touched,
this older skin: the underbrush it split, the loose soil
it furrowed, the scalding stones it coiled around
and cooled, soaking in heat from every side...
I've heard it's a painless process, this days-long
unzipping. It's just a surface, they say: the body feels
nothing as it pulls away. Soon the snake will glisten again—
slick and unencumbered; re-striped; ready to race.
I don't know if a goodbye is better fast or slow:
a violent rip, or a subtle sloughing off.
If it's healthier to see the skin go—
a scroll of our lives unfurling, with legible scars—
or to lose pieces of ourselves without knowing:
rushing down the drain with the soap flakes,
gathering as dust on an uncracked book,
swirling in the air when the light is right...
Five million transformations every minute.
First and last impressions raining
all around us. Drier than dry. Weightless
and impossible to carry. Here and gone.
As we head into a holiday season unlike any other in our lifetimes, many of us will be thinking of our families, the ones that we may not be able to spend the end of the year with. Instead, spend some time with these stories, essays, and poetry about family relations.
Escoffery’s short story shows us the world of first-generation Jamaican-Americans as two young brothers navigate their neighborhoods, their worlds. Fittingly for 2020, this story is about a pestilence—locusts, not viruses—but it’s also about families, how they love and touch each other, and the stories they tell each other.
There’s an alternate ending to my father’s goat story, but on this occasion, he punctuated it with unbridled laughter, and my mother slapped him with the dishtowel, saying, “You’re too cruel, man,” but her eyes brimmed with love.
Kelli Jo Ford’s “You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave” is a ghost story, as much as it is a story about mothers and daughters. The story deals with the role reversal of a daughter having come back home to take care of the mother, and all that has changed in the home that she has left.
Lula had the seizure while she was out on one of her countryside drives, taking in scenery she’d seen a million times—probably on her way home from McDonald’s. Thankfully, she’d only run through somebody’s barbed wire fence. No one was hurt, though she was still having the seizure when a man stopped and called 911. Lula came to in the back of the ambulance and demanded to be brought home.
In this essay, Hemans faces down the possibility of losing her grandparents’ home in Montego Bay. She digs deep into her grandparents’ personal history, her family’s immigrant experience, and the history of Jamaica to discuss how she’s given all of this a home within her own writing.
The fate of the abandoned house in my novel—and that of my family—is not a unique story. It is a story most every immigrant in America can tell of family land left alone too long or lingering in limbo, of migrants who had great plans to return home but who, after years abroad, find it hard to return to a place they’ve long left, a town empty of friends and family.
“Mixed” is a poem by Jessica Care Moore that talks about lineage, and how the actions of our family stick with us. “Mixed” also showcases the theme of identity, and the importance of being true to oneself.
I pray on my great GrandFather’s feathers —the ones you don’t respect— That you never dare call me Mixed
In this essay, Tia Glista writes about how stories revolving around the dynamics of sisters have always fascinated readers. From the March sisters in Little Women to the Lisbons in The Virgin Suicides to the Kardashians, sisterhood exerts a powerful gravity on culture.With this essay, Glista explores the role that sisters have played in film and literature, and asks what role sisters should play in art.
Maybe this is what storytellers find so perplexing about sisters—that they cannot conceptualize a world in which women rely more on each other than they do on men. Where notions of female friendship, love, or solidarity have seemed too radical for our culture to grapple with, we instead access the bonds between women through sisterhood, and find an easy way to reroute women and girls back to the heterosexual, patriarchal, nuclear family.
Two years after Prince’s death, Hillery Stone muses on another disappearance: her mysterious and troubled cousin who introduced her to the singer’s work. Stone connects Prince’s catalog and history to her own personal and familial loss.
He was also a master of the disappearing act, the epitome of reinvention, receding and returning from rock god to mystic to sex kitten in the blink of a gold-shadowed eye. At some point, I saw Prince and I saw my cousin, not a physical likeness so much as a shared absence — a part in each of them that had existed and been taken away.
Verma contrasts the stoic grandfather she knew as a child with the romantic, deeply emotional young man she discovers in his poetry after his death—and realizes that by teaching her to love books, he gave her the tools to get to know him through his writing.
My mother, knowing I would feel lonely and distant upon his death, pulled me aside to show me something…It was a book of poetry, which in itself was not surprising. I had graduated from college with a degree in creative writing, and had a few poems in small journals and zines. My mother must have known a book of poems would cheer me up. And it was Nanu, after all, who by turning me to books, had led me to poetry as the one friend I always turn to in times of distress.
Alcoholism memoirs don’t exactly help Held understand her mother’s drinking—but, she says, books like Mary Karr’s Lit, Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering help her to give shape and structure to her family’s story, and envision a more hopeful end.
In these memoirs, relapses are absorbed in the rhythm of the story. Personal history is arranged into a structure of how things got to where they were, their undoing similarly templatized. The narratives follow identical trajectories, a characteristic that gets them panned in critical reviews but celebrated in the comment section on Goodreads and Amazon. “It feels like this book was written about me,” readers say. The drama of addiction becomes mundane, the same moment again and again. What feels acute and personal is neither. It’s just part of it, a story every addict has.
The narrator of “The Neighbors” is getting to know Luisa, who is new to the block. When she notices the “ghost of a bruise” on Luisa, she decides to try to reveal her own bruise, hoping that they can share their secrets with each other.
The man put his hand on her head, right at the nape of her neck. She looked so vulnerable there, at the back of the head, with her hair so short, short like a baby’s, so close to the soft skull. His hand there was familiar to me, the gesture full of the brutal tenderness of husbands. I couldn’t see her face to tell if she was happy or sad.
In “Randy Travis” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, the narrator’s mother is completely enthralled with the country singer Randy Travis. This story is about how a refugee family tries to live out their American Dream, which includes trying to cross paths with the country singer whom the matriarch has grown to love.
The only thing my mother liked about the new country we were living in was its music. We had been given a small radio as part of the welcome package from the refugee settlement program. There were other items in the box, such as snow pants, mittens, and new underwear, but it was the radio she cherished most.
Look, we’re all tired of hearing snobs declaim, “Well, the book was better, you know?” I’m even tired of hearing myself say it, which I’ve occasionally been known to do. And there are plenty of film adaptations that I enjoy as much as or even more than their literary counterparts (see, for instance, much of Saoirse Ronan’s filmography). But there is something quite enervating about seeing a beloved classic—or even a not-so-critically acclaimed novel!—being turned into a limp, listless vehicle for an A-list actor, a sullen would-be blockbuster with horrible special effects, or just an outright unwatchable piece of drivel we’re all supposed to take seriously because it was a book first.
The following list could easily have been twice as long—thrice, even! But this set of movies is especially emblematic of the many ways filmmakers in the 21st century have botched and butchered novels in their translation from the page to the screen.
Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel had already been famously adapted back in 1940 into an Academy Award-winning film (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, no less). The black and white film mined the novel’s gothic aesthetic for a sumptuous and terrifying tale about a young woman who weds a moneyed English man and moves into his estate only to be haunted by his dead first wife. In Ben Wheatley’s hands, du Maurier’s psychologically probing character study is refashioned into a rather steamy and only occasionally scary Lifetime TV movie romance between Maxim de Winter (a much too dashing Armie Hammer) and the new Mrs. de Winter (Lily James, in full doe-eyed mode). “I can see the woman I am now,” she beams in its closing moments, “And I know I have made the right decision. To save the one thing worth walking through the flames for: Love.” Compare to the last lines of the novel: “The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.” Is it surprising that so many of us found ourselves rolling our eyes at such absurd reframing of one of literature’s most gripping final images?
The tale of Beowulf, chronicled in an untitled Old English poem, has all the hallmarks of a 21st century comic book movie: epic battles, heroic protagonists, bombastic fight scenes, monstrous villains, and even dragons. Shot with motion-capture technology, it was billed as a way to bring this ancient story into the modern world. But focusing on painstakingly created special effects (like the choice to give Angelina Jolie’s near-nude character cave-dwellinghigh heels?) meant we got less of a comic book story and more of a Boris Vallejo painting, with no movement or depth.
Set in modern-day New York, Rob Letterman’s Gulliver’s Travels follows Jack Black as “Lemuel Gulliver,” a sad sack wannabe travel writer who considers Shakespeare, Krakauer, and “the hot mom who wrote Twilight” his writing inspirations, as he finds himself stranded in Lilliput (on his way to Bermuda; don’t ask) where he’s imprisoned and proceeds to, in broad strokes, gesture toward a Cliffs Notes version of Jonathan Swift’s seminal satire. Do I actually need to explain why it belongs on this list? But lest you need more convincing, the script further includes nods to Guitar Hero, Yoda and Kiss, glaringly obvious attempts to “hip” up Swift’s story that further showed how much of this was merely a Jack Black comedy that used Gulliver’s Travels as the most tone-deaf marketing ploy on this list.
Like its “Picture”-less title, this dreary 2009 adaptation completely misses the point of Oscar Wilde’s infamous novel. (Who cares about Dorian without his picture?) With a listless Ben Barnes in the title role, this filmed Dorian may look the part but lacks the pristine charm (and later his unnerving cruelty) of his literary predecessor. In attempting to turn The Picture of Dorian Gray into a brooding, gothic superhero origin tale Oliver Parker muddles Wilde’s colorful prose in ways both literal and metaphoric, offering us what has to be the straightest (pun intended) take on this dandy protagonist as we’ve gotten yet. I mean, any film that wastes casting Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy himself!) as Lord Henry Wotton truly deserves our scorn.
The title of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010’s mashup novel was always, perhaps, destined to become a “blockbuster” movie. Or a movie that desperately wanted to be a blockbuster (it ended up grossing only half as much as it cost to make). Instead of conjuring up a winking playful lark with impressive historical set-pieces, director Timur Bekmambetov delivered instead a laborious bore that didn’t live up to the absurdity its title promised. You’d think casting the studly Benjamin Walker as Lincoln would at least make this incongruous adaptation worth watching, but you may as well get your Walker fix elsewhere (may I suggest YouTube clips of his roles on Broadway in American Psycho and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson?).
Sometimes a film adaptation misses the mark not because it doesn’t honor its source material but because it merely reveals the source material’s limitations. Take Hillbilly Elegy. In many ways Ron Howard’s take on J.D. Vance’s memoir about his life growing up in Ohio is a perfectly fine film. And I do mean fine in that backhanded Southern compliment sort of way. With two overly histrionic performances at its center (who knew Amy Adams and Glenn Close could chew so much scenery?), Howard has created what feels like a parody of one of those Trump voter/diner articles we’ve been fed for the past few years: there’s an attempt here to empathize with the plight of Vance and his working class family but it is all so nakedly self-congratulatory and melodramatic that it just comes off as a grating piece of ill-conceived liberal leaning ethnography.
I’ll admit right off the bat: I am Goldfinch agnostic. I didn’t get the love showered upon the novel when it came out and I definitely did not feel any different by the time this limp adaptation was released. Donna Tartt’s prose is impeccable and I loved the pre-Vegas first third of the book. But, and here we get into why John Crowley’s take somewhat falters, the tale of Theodore Decker (yet another tortured white guy) so depends on the inner turmoil of its protagonist that his somewhat epic bildungsroman is blunted by Ansel Elgort’s tepid performance.
Some books just should stay books, you know? I think, at times, we’ve been trained to believe that our beloved novel or cherished childhood fave deserves to be adapted into the big screen, as if this is somehow a marker of success or a chance for them to be introduced to newer generations (have we so forsaken the role of librarians?). But not every adaptation is a tribute—take this ill-fated version of one of Dr. Seuss’s most famous texts. Mike Myers’s nightmarish take on the titular role made this top hat wearing cat sound like a never-made-it-to-air SNL character, replete with a befuddling Brooklynite accent and an utter lack of charm. It’s no surprise Seuss’s widow refused to allow any further live-action adaptations (not even she, though, was able to spare us from that recent catastrophe that was the live TV Grinch musical.)
I don’t know who picks up Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and thinks, you know what? I’m going to turn this Victorian-era surreal ode to language and wordplay into a Tim Burton-directed CGI spectacle that feels like a Disneyland ride for sugar-high kids (and actually-high teens). But perhaps that just shows why I will never grow up to be a studio executive. Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, after all, grossed more than $1 billion (!) around the world, proving there was a market for Johnny Depp’s unhinged acid trip of a Mad Hatter. We know it’s possible to bring Carroll’s cast of characters to the screen while keeping the spirit of the original stories somewhat intact (see, for instance, the classic-in-its-own-right 1951 Disney animated film). But there was something quite grotesque about seeing Carroll’s playful rhymes being traded in for a vision of Alice as a 21st century “kickass” protagonist.
There’s no mistaking Augusten Burroughs’s prose. His dry wit is what made his 2002 memoir such a sensation. The promise of Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brian Cox (among others) tackling the wild menagerie of characters that populate Burroughs’s coming of age tale would otherwise have guaranteed a fascinating black comedy. Sadly, Ryan Murphy, then still mostly known for hit-and-miss shows like Popular and Nip/Tuck, found little ground on which to anchor this would-be biting comedy about a young man and the dysfunctional families around him. Showing early signs that shoe-horning earnest histrionics and cutting one-liners into outrageous scenes was his preferred method of crafting comedic set-pieces, Murphy flattened Burroughs’s delicious dialogue and made his story near-unpalatable, making us all stress yet again that, yes, the book was infinitely better.
“The Little Restaurant Near Place des Ternes” by Georges Simenon
The clock in its black case, which regular customers had always known to stand in the same place, over the rack where the serviettes were kept, showed four minutes to nine. The advertising calendar behind the head of the woman sitting at the till, Madame Bouchet, showed that it was the twenty-fourth day of December.
Outside, a fine rain was falling. Inside, it was warm. A pot-bellied stove, like the ones there used to be in railway stations, sat in the very centre of the room. Its black chimney pipe rose through empty space before disappearing into a wall.
Madame Bouchet’s lips moved as she counted the banknotes. The bar’s owner stood patiently by, watching her, while in his hand he was already holding the grey linen bag into which he put the contents of the till every evening.
Albert, the waiter, glanced up at the clock, drifted over to them and with a wink motioned towards a bottle which stood apart from the others on the counter. The landlord in turn looked at the time, gave a shrug and nodded his assent.
“Just because they’re the last ones here, there’s no reason, why we shouldn’t give them a drink like the others,” he muttered under his breath as he walked off with the tray.
He had a habit of talking to himself while he was working.
The landlord’s car stood waiting by the curb outside. He lived some distance away, at Joinville, where he had had a villa built for him. His wife had previously worked the tills in cafés. He had been a waiter. He still had painful feet from those days, as all waiters in bars and restaurants do, and wore special shoes. The back of his car was filled with attractively wrapped parcels which he was taking home for the Christmas Eve festivities.
Madame Bouchet would get the bus to Rue Coulaincourt, where she would be spending Christmas with her daughter, whose husband worked as a clerk at the town hall.
Albert had two young kids, and their toys had been hidden for several days on top of the tall linen cupboard.
He began with the man, putting a small glass on the table, which he then filled with Armagnac.
“It’s on the house,” he said.
He made his way past several empty tables to the corner where Jeanne – Long Tall Jeanne – had just lit a cigarette, carefully positioned himself between her and the till and muttered:
“Drink up quick so I can pour you another! Compliments of the landlord!”
Finally, he got to the last table in the row. A young woman was taking her lipstick out of her handbag as she looked at herself in a small hand mirror.
“With the compliments of the house …”
She looked up at him in surprise.
“It’s the custom here at Christmas.”
“Thank you.”
He would gladly have poured her a second glass too, but he did not know her well enough. Besides she was sitting too near the till.
All done! He tipped the landlord another wink by way of asking him if it was at last time for him to go outside and pull down the shutters. It was already stretching hospitality to have stayed open this late just for three customers. At this point in the evening in most of the restaurants in Paris, staff would be scurrying around setting out tables for the late-night Christmas Eve supper trade. But this was a small restaurant which offered a regular clientele modestly priced menus, a quiet place to eat just off Place des Ternes in the least frequented part of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
Few people had eaten there that evening. More or less everyone had family or friends to go to. The last ones left were these two women and a man, and the waiter was not bold enough to show them the door. But the fact that they went on sitting at their tables, from which the cloths had been removed, surely meant that they had no one waiting for them.
He lowered the left-hand shutter, then the right, came back in, wavered over lowering the shutter over the door, which would force the reluctant customers to crouch down to get out. But it was now nine o’clock. The takings had been counted. Madame Bouchet had put on her black hat, her coat and her tippet of marten fur and was looking for her gloves. The landlord, his feet turned outwards, advanced a few steps. Long Tall Jeanne was still smoking her cigarette, and the young woman had clumsily caked her mouth with lipstick. The restaurant was about to close. It was time. It was past the time. The landlord was about to say, as politely as he could, the time-honored words:
“Ladies and gentlemen …”
But before he could pronounce one syllable, there was a single, crisp sound, and the only male customer, his eyes suddenly wide open as if he’d been taken completely by surprise, swayed before toppling sideways on the bench seat that ran along the wall.
He had walked in casually, without saying a word, without warning anybody that just as they were about to close he would put a bullet in his head.
“It would be best if you waited here for a few moments,” the landlord told the two women. “There’s a policeman on duty on the corner of the street. Albert has gone to get him.”
Long Tall Jeanne had stood up to get a look at the dead man and, pausing by the stove, she lit another cigarette. The young woman in her corner sucked her handkerchief and, although it was hot there, was shaking all over.
The policeman came in. His cape glistened with rain and gave off a barrack-room smell.
“Do you know him?”
“He’s been eating here every day for years. He’s Russian.”
“Are you sure he’s dead? If he is, we’d better wait for the inspector. I’ve phoned through to him.”
They did not have long to wait. The police station was close by, in Rue de l’Étoile. The inspector wore an overcoat which was either badly cut or had shrunk in the rain, and a hat that had faded to no particular color. He did not seem in a good mood.
“The first of tonight’s crop!” he muttered as he bent over. “He’s early. Usually it comes on them around midnight, when everybody else is having most fun.”
He straightened up, holding a wallet in his hand. He opened it and from it took a thick, green identity card.
“Alexis Borine, fifty-six years old, born in Vilna.”
He recited the words in an undertone, as a priest says mass and the way Albert talked to himself.
“Hôtel de Bordeaux, Rue Brey … Engineer … Was he an engineer?” he asked the landlord.
“He might have been, a long time ago, but ever since he’s been coming here he’s been working as an extra in films. I recognized him several times up on the screen.”
“Any witnesses?” asked the inspector as he turned round.
“There’s me, my cashier, the waiter and the two ladies there. If you’d like to take their names first …”
The inspector found himself face to face with Jeanne, who really was tall, half a head taller than him.
“Fancy seeing you here. Papers.”
She handed him her card. He wrote down:
“Jeanne Chartrain. Age: twenty-eight. Profession, none … Oh come on! No profession? …”
“It’s what they put me down as at the town hall.”
“Have you got the other card?”
She nodded.
“Up to date, is it?”
“Still as charmless as ever, I see,” she said with a smile.
“What about you?”
The question was directed at the badly made-up young woman, who stammered:
“I haven’t got my identity card on me. My name is Martine Cornu. I am nineteen and I was born at Yport …”
The tall woman gave a start and looked at her more closely. Yport was very near where she came from, not more than five kilometers away. And there were lots of people in the area by the name of Cornu. The people who ran Yport’s largest café, overlooking the beach, were called Cornu.
“Address?” growled Inspector Lognon, who was known locally as “Inspector Hard-Done-By”.
“I live in an apartment building in Rue Brey. Number 17.”
“You will probably be called for questioning at the station one of these days. And now you can go.”
He was waiting for the municipal ambulance. Madame Bouchet asked:
“Can I go too?”
“If you want.”
Then, as she left, he called Long Tall Jeanne back as she was making her way to the door.
“You didn’t happen to know him?”
“I turned a trick with him ages ago, maybe six months … At least six months, because it was at the start of summer … He was the sort of client who goes with girls to talk more than for any other reason, who asks you questions and thinks you’re a sad case … Since then he’s never said hello, though whenever he comes in here he always gives me a little nod.”
The young woman left. Jeanne followed her out, keeping very close behind her. She was wearing a cheap fur coat which was far too short for her. She had always worn clothes which were too short. Everyone told her so, but she persisted without knowing why, and the effect was to make her look even taller.
“Home” for her was fifty metrer further along on the right, in the total darkness of Square du Roule, where there were only artists; studios and single-storey maisonettes. She had a small first-floor apartment with a private staircase and a door opening directly on to the street to which she had the key.
She had promised herself she would go straight home that evening. She never stayed out on Christmas Eve. She had hardly any make-up on and was wearing very ordinary clothes. So much so that she had been shocked in the restaurant to see the young woman piling on the lipstick.
She took a few steps into the cul de sac perched on her high heels, which she could hear clacking on the cobbles. Then she realized that her spirits had drooped because of the Russian: she felt she needed to walk in light and fill her ears with noise. So she turned and headed towards Place des Ternes, where the broad, brilliantly illuminated swathe that runs down from the Arc de Triomphe comes to an end. The cinemas, the theaters, the restaurants were all lit up. In the windows, printed pennants advertised the prices and menus of Christmas Eve suppers and on every door could be read the word “Full”.
The streets were almost unrecognizable, for there was hardly anyone about.
The young woman was now walking ten metres ahead of her, looking like someone who is not sure which way to go. She kept stopping in front of a shop window or at a street corner, uncertain whether to cross, standing and staring at the photographs hanging on the walls of the warm foyer of a cinema.
“Anybody would think she’s the one touting for custom!”
When he saw the Russian, Lognon had muttered:
“The first of tonight’s crop … He’s early.”
Maybe he’d done it there rather than in the street, because it would have been an even more miserable end outside, or alone in his furnished room. In the restaurant, it had been quiet and peaceful, almost a family atmosphere. There a man could feel he was surrounded by familiar faces. It was warm. He’d even been offered a drink on the house!
She gave a shrug. She had nothing else to do. She too halted outside shop windows and looked at the photos while the luminous neon signs turned her red and green and violet, and all the time she was aware of the young woman who was still walking just ahead of her.
Who knows, perhaps she had come across her when she was a little girl. There were ten years between them. When she’d worked for the Fisheries at Fécamp – she was already as tall but very skinny – many a Sunday she had gone out with boys to dances at Yport. Sometimes she had gone dancing at the Café Cornu, and the owner’s children were always running around the place.
“Don’t trip over the tadpoles,” she would tell her partners.
She called the kids tadpoles. Her own brothers and sisters were tadpoles too. She’d had six or seven of them back then, but there wouldn’t be as many left there now.
All the people she passed either were in groups, already in high spirits, or were couples clinging to each other more tightly, it seemed, than on ordinary days.
It was strange to think that this girl was probably one of the tadpoles from the Café Cornu!
Above the shops all along the avenue were apartments, and nearly all of their windows were lit up. She gazed up at them, raising her head to the refreshing drizzle, sometimes catching a glimpse of shadows moving behind the curtains, and she wondered:
“What are they doing?”
Most likely they would be reading the newspaper or decorating the Christmas tree as they waited for midnight. In some cases, the lady of the house would soon be receiving guests and was now worrying about whether the dinner would turn out right.
Thousands of children were sleeping, or pretending to be asleep. And almost all the people who had flocked to the cinemas and theaters had booked tables in restaurants for their Christmas Eve supper or reserved their seats in church for midnight mass.
For you had to book your seat in churches too. Otherwise perhaps the girl might have gone there?
All the people she passed either were in groups, already in high spirits, or were couples clinging to each other more tightly, it seemed, than on ordinary days.
Lone pedestrians were also in more of a hurry than on normal days. They gave the impression that they were on their way somewhere, that they had people waiting for them.
Was that why the Russian had put a bullet in his head? And also why Inspector Hard-Done-By had said that there would be more to follow?
It was the day that did it, of course it was! The girl in front of her had halted on the corner of Rue Brey. The third tenement along was a hotel, and there were others too, discreet establishments where rooms could be taken for short periods. Actually it was there that Jeanne had gone with her first ever customer. The Russian had been living until today in the hotel next door, very probably on the very top floor, because only the poorest rooms were let by the month or the week.
What was the Cornu girl looking at? Fat Émilie? Now there was a tart without either shame or religion. She was there, even though it was Christmas, and she couldn’t even bother to walk a few steps up and down so that she wouldn’t look quite so obvious.
She stayed put in the doorway, with the words “Furnished Rooms” emblazoned just above her purple hat. But there she was, old, well past forty, enormously fat now, and her feet, which over time had become as sensitive as those of the owner of the restaurant, were almost terminally tired of ferrying all that flab around.
“Evening, Jeanne!” she sang out across the street.
Jeanne did not answer. Why was she following the girl? For no particular reason. Probably because she didn’t have anything else to do and was afraid of going home.
But the Cornu girl did not know where she was going either. She had turned into Rue Brey automatically and was mincing along unhurriedly, tightly buttoned up in her blue two-piece suit, which was far too thin for the time of year.
She was a pretty girl. A touch chubby. With a diverting little rear end which she wiggled as she walked. In the restaurant, seen from the side, the way her full, high breasts had pushed out the front of her jacket had been very noticeable.
“If any man comes on to you tonight, dearie,” thought Jeanne, “it’ll be your own stupid fault!”
Especially that evening, because respectable men, the ones with family, friends or just social acquaintances, weren’t out wandering the streets.
But the little fool did not know that. Did she even know what Fat Émilie was doing standing outside the entrance of the hotel? From time to time, as she walked past a bar, she would stand on tiptoe and look inside.
Ah! She was going into one. Albert had done her no favors by giving her that drink. At the beginning, it had been the same with Jeanne too. Unfortunately for her, if she’d had one drink, she ‘d have to have another. And when she’d had three, she no longer knew what she was doing. It wasn;t like that any more, not by a long chalk! Nowadays she could certainly put it away before she’d had enough!
The bar was called Chez Fred. It had a long, mahogany counter and the kind of high stools on which women cannot perch without showing a lot of leg. It was virtually empty. Just one man at the back, a musician or maybe a dancer, already in a dinner jacket, who would shortly be going to work in some night-spot nearby. He was eating a sandwich and drinking beer.
Martine Cornu hoisted herself on to a stool by the door, against the wall. Jeanne went in and sat down a little further along.
“Armagnac,” she ordered, since that was what she had begun drinking.
The girl looked at the rows of bottles which, lit from above, formed a rainbow of subtle colours.
“A Benedictine …” she said.
The barman turned the knob of a radio, and sickly-sweet music filled the bar.
Why didn’t Jeanne just walk up to her and ask her straight out if she really was a Cornu from Yport? There were Cornus in Fécamp too, cousins, but they were butchers in Rue du Havre.
The musician – or dancer – at the back of the bar had already noticed Martine and was languidly giving her the eye.
“Got any cigarettes?” the girl asked the barman.
She wasn’t used to smoking, as was patently obvious from the way she opened the packet and blinked as she released the smoke.
It was ten o’clock. Another two hours and it would be midnight. Everyone would kiss and hug. In every house, the radio would blare out verses of “O Holy Night,” and everybody would join in.
Really, it was all very silly. Jeanne, who never had problems speaking to anybody, felt quite incapable of approaching this girl who hailed from her part of the world and whom she had probably met when she was just a child.
But it wouldn’t have been unpleasant. She’d have said:
“Seeing as how you’re all alone and looking sorry for yourself, why don’t we spend a quiet Christmas Eve together?”
She knew exactly how to mind her manners. She wouldn’t talk to her about men or about being on the game. There must be a whole lot of people they both knew at Fécamp and Yport whom they could talk about. And why shouldn’t she take her home with her?
Her place was very neat, very tidy. She had lived for long enough in rented rooms to know what it meant to have a place of her own. She could take the girl there without feeling any sense of shame, because she never brought men home with her. Other girls did. For Long Tall Jeanne, it was a matter of principle. And few apartments were as trim and spotless as hers. She even kept felt undersoles behind the front door which she used like skates on rainy days so as not to dirty the wooden floor, which she kept highly polished, like an ice-rink.
They would buy a couple of bottles, something good but not too strong. There were charcutiers still open which sold different kinds of pâté, lobster, scallops and assorted tasty and attractively presented dishes which they could not afford to eat every day of the week.
She knew exactly how to mind her manners. She wouldn’t talk to her about men or about being on the game.
She watched her out of the corner of her eye. Perhaps eventually she would have spoken to her if the door hadn’t opened at that moment and two men hadn’t come in, the kind Jeanne disliked, the sort of men who, when they enter a room, always look around as if they owned the place.
“Evening, Fred!” said the shorter of the two, who was also fatter.
They had already taken stock of the bar. An uninterested glance at the musician sitting at the back, and a closer look at Jeanne who, now that she was sitting down, did not seem as tall as she did standing up – which, incidentally, was why she often worked out of bars.
Of course, they knew at a glance exactly what she was. On the other hand they stared insistently at Martine then sat very close to her.
“Do you mind?”
She shrank back against the wall, still holding her cigarette as clumsily as before.
“What are you having, Willy?”
“The usual.”
“The usual, Fred.”
They were the type of men who often have foreign accents and are heard talking about horse-racing or discussing cars. They were also the sort who knew how to choose the right moment to give a woman the glad eye, walk her into a corner of the room and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. And wherever they happen to be they always need to make a phone call.
The barman started mixing them a complicated drink while they watched him closely.
“Hasn’t the baron been in?”
“He said he wanted one of you to call him. He’s gone to see Francis.”
The taller of the pair went into the phone booth. The other moved closer to Martine.
“That stuff’s no good for the stomach,” he said, clicking the catch of a gold cigarette case.
She looked at him in surprise. Jeanne wanted to call out to her:
“Don’t answer!”
Because the moment she started talking to him it would be difficult to shake him off.
“What’s no good for the stomach?”
She was behaving like the dumb cluck that she was. She even forced herself to smile, probably because she had been taught to smile when talking to people, or maybe because she really believed it made her look like something off the cover of a magazine.
“That stuff you’re drinking.”
“But it’s Benedictine!”
She really was from Fécamp, way out in the sticks! She honestly thought that saying the name was the last word on the subject.
“Of course it is! There’s nothing like it for upsetting the insides! Fred!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring us another here, for the lady, and make it snappy.”
“Coming up.”
“But …” she tried to protest.
“Just a drink between friends, no need to be scared! It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it, yes or no?”
The tall one straightened his tie in the mirror as he stepped out of the phone booth. He cottoned on quickly.
“Do you live around here?”
“Not far.”
“Barman!” call Jeanne, “give me one of the same.”
“Armagnac?”
“No. One of whatever it was you just poured.”
“A sidecar?”
“Go on, then.”
She felt furious, for no good reason, and wanted to say:
“Listen, darling, it won’t be long now before you pass out … These guys play dirty … If you wanted a drink, couldn’t you have chosen a more suitable bar? Or gone home and got drunk there?”
Of course she herself hadn’t gone home either, even though she was used to living alone. But does anybody want to go home on Christmas Eve knowing there is no one waiting there and with the prospect of lying in bed listening to the sound of music and happy voices coming through the wall?
Soon the doors of cinemas and theaters would open and out would spill impatient crowds who would rush away to the tens of thousands of tables they had reserved in the most modern restaurants in the most far-flung parts of town. Christmas Eve junketings to suit all pockets!
Except – and this was the point – you couldn’t reserve a table for one. Not least because it wouldn’t be fair on folk who go out to have a good time with friends, not fair at all for you to sit by yourself in a corner and watch the goings-on. What would that make you? A wet blanket! You would see them form into huddles and whisper to each other, wondering if they should ask you to join them because they felt sorry for you.
Nor could you go out and roam around the streets, because if you did, every cop on the beat would eye you suspiciously, curious to see if you intended to use some dark corner to do what the Russian had done, or if, despite the cold, one of them was going to have to jump into the Seine and fish you out.
“What do you think of it?”
“It’s not very strong.”
If her parents really ran a bistro, she should have known about such things. But it was what women always say. It’s as if they’re always expecting to be given liquid fire in a glass. But when it turns out to be not as strong as they’d thought, they stop being so suspicious.
“Work in a shop, do you?”
“No …”
“Typist? …”
“Yes.”
“Been in Paris long?”
He had teeth like a film star’s and a moustache made of two commas.
“Do you like dancing?”
“Sometimes.”
Oh, they were laying it on very thick! How pleasant the thought of exchanging idle chat like this in such company! Maybe the girl believed they really were men of the world? The gold case held out to her and the Egyptian cigarettes too probably dazzled her eyes, as did the large diamond ring worn by the man closest to her.
“Fill us up again, Fred.”
“Not for me, thanks. Anyway, it’s time I …”
“Time you? …”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s time you … did what? You can’t be going home to bed at half past ten on Christmas Eve! …”
It was weird! Sitting on the sidelines and watching a scene like this being acted out always makes it look so utterly stupid. But to be involved, to play a part in it …
“What a birdbrain!” Jeanne muttered as she smoked one cigarette after another without taking her eyes off the trio.
Naturally, Martine did not dare to admit that, yes, she was, actually, intending to go home to bed.
“Have you got a date?”
“Don’t be so nosy.”
“Got a boyfriend?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Well, I’d be more than happy to keep him waiting for a bit.”
“Why?”
Long Tall Jeanne could have recited the whole script for them. She knew it by heart. She had also caught the look aimed at the barman which meant:
“Keep it coming!”
But in her present condition, the erstwhile tadpole from Yport could have been plied with the stiffest of cocktails and she would have found them not strong at all. Likewise her lipstick: didn’t she have enough on already? Yet she still felt the need for more, to open her handbag and show she used Houbigant lipstick, but also to demonstrate her pout, because all women believe they are irresistible when they push out their lips to receive that impudent little implement.
“Think you’re gorgeous? If you could only see yourself in a mirror, you’d soon realize which of the two of us looks most like a tart!”
But not quite, because the difference is not just a matter of a little more or less warpaint. The proof of this was provided by the two men who, as they came in, had needed only a quick look to pigeonhole Jeanne.
“Ever been to the Monico?”
“No. What is it?”
“Hear that, Albert? She’s never been to the Monico!”
“Don’t make me laugh!”
“But you do like dancing? Now look, sweetheart …”
Jeanne was expecting the word, but later rather than sooner. The man wasn’t wasting any time. His leg was already pressed tight against one of the girl’s in such a way that she could not draw it back, for she was too close to the wall.
“It’s one of the most amazing night-spots in Paris. Regulars only. Bob Alisson and his jazz band. Never heard of Bob Alisson either?”
“I don’t go out much.”
The two men exchanged winks. Obvious where this was leading. A few minutes from now, the small fat one would remember that he had an urgent appointment so that he could leave the field clear for his friend.
“Not so fast, you creeps!” Jeanne murmured, her mind made up.
She herself had also downed three drinks one after the other, not counting the free ones she’d had courtesy of the landlord of the restaurant. She was not drunk, she never was, not completely, but she was beginning to attach great importance to certain notions.
For example, the idea that this silly kid came from the same place as she did, that she was a tadpole. Then she thought of fat Émilie standing in the doorway of the hotel. It was in that very hotel, though not on a Christmas Eve, that she had gone upstairs with a man for the first time.
“Could you give me a light?”
She had slid off her stool and, with a cigarette dangling between her lips, now joined the smaller of the two men.
He was also aware what this meant and was not best pleased. He gave her a critical once-over. Standing upright, he must have been a good head shorter than her, and the way she carried herself was mannish.
“Like to buy a girl a drink?”
“If you insist … Fred!”
“Coming up.”
While this was going on, the kid eyed her with a feeling close to indignation, as if an attempt was being made to steal something that belonged to her.
“Hey, you three don’t look like you’re having much fun!”
And, laying one hand on the shoulder of the man next to her, Jeanne started belting out the words of the song the radio was playing softly in the background.
“Of all the bird-brained …” she kept saying to herself every ten minutes. “How can anyone be so …?”
But, oddest of all, the birdbrain in question continued looking at her with an expression of the utmost contempt.
But one of Willy’s arms had now entirely disappeared behind Martine’s back, and the hand wearing the diamond ring lay heavily on the front of her blouse.
She now lay slumped – literally – on the red plush seat against the wall of the Monico, and there was now no need to put her glass in her hand because more often than not she herself kept clamouring for it and gulped down the champagne greedily.
Each time she drained her glass, she burst into a fit of convulsive laughter and then clung even more tightly to the man she was with.
It was not yet midnight. Most of the tables were unoccupied. Sometimes the two of them had the dance floor to themselves. Willy kept his nose buried in the short hair at the back of his partner’s head and ran his lips over the pimply skin of the nape of her neck.
“You in a bad mood or something?” Jeanne asked the other man.
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t win first prize. Think I’m too tall?”
“A bit …”
“It doesn’t show lying down.”
It was a crack she had made thousands of times. It was almost a chat-up line and just as vapid as the sweet nothings the two others were whispering to each other – but at least she wasn’t soft-soaping him because she was enjoying it.
“Do you reckon Christmas Eve is fun?”
“Not especially.”
“Do you think anyone really enjoys it?”
“I suppose some people must …”
“Earlier on, in the restaurant where I had dinner, this man shot himself in a corner, without making a fuss, looking like he was sorry for disturbing us and making a mess on the floor.”
“Haven’t you got anything more cheerful to say?”
“All right, order another bottle. I’m thirsty.”
It was the only option remaining. Get the tadpole blind drunk, because she was stubbornly refusing to realize what was happening. Make her sick to her stomach, so sick that she puked, then all she’d be fit for was to be packed off home and put to bed.
“Cheers, sweetie, and likewise to all the Cornus of Yport town and district!”
“You’re from there?”
“From Fécamp. There was a time when I used to go dancing in Yport every Sunday.”
“Cut it out!” snapped Willy. “We’ve not come here to listen to your life stories …”
When they’d been in the bar in Rue Brey, it had seemed on the cards that one more glass would have finished the tadpole off. But instead the opposite had happened.
Perhaps being out in the fresh air for a few minutes had been enough to revive her? Maybe it was the champagne? The more she drank the wider awake she became. But she was no longer the same young girl she had been in the restaurant. Willy was now slotting cigarettes ready-lit between her lips, and she was drinking out of his glass. It was sickening to see. And that hand of his never stopped pawing her blouse and skirt!
Not much longer now until everyone would be hugging and kissing and that repulsive man would clamp his lips on the mouth of the girl, who would be stupid enough to faint away in his arms.
“That’s what we’re all like at her age! They should ban Christmas altogether …”
And all the other public holidays too! … But now it was Long Tall Jeanne who wasn’t thinking straight.
“What say we go on to some other place?”
Maybe this time the fresh air would have the opposite effect, and Martine would finally pass out. And if she did, most likely the two-bit gigolo wouldn’t try to take her home and go up to her room!
“We’re fine here …”
Meanwhile, Martine, still glaring suspiciously at Jeanne, talked about her in a whisper to her beau. She was probably saying:
“Why is she interfering? Who is she? She looks like a …”
Suddenly the sound of jazz stopped. For a few seconds, there was silence. People rose to their feet.
The band struck up “O Holy Night”.
Oh yes, it was here too! And Martine found herself squeezed tightly to Willy’s chest, their bodies melded into one from feet to foreheads and their mouths scandalously stuck together.
“Hey, you disgusting pair! …”
Long Tall Jeanne bore down on them, shrill and loud-mouthed, arms and legs moving jerkily like a puppet with its strings crossed.
“Aren’t you going to give anyone else a look in?”
And then raising her voice:
“Shift yourself, girl, and make a bit of room for me!”
When they didn’t move, she grabbed Martine by the shoulder and yanked her back.
“You still haven’t got it, have you, you stupid cow! Maybe you think your precious Willy here has got eyes only for you? But what if I got jealous?”
People at other tables were listening and watching.
“I haven’t said anything up to now. I didn’t interfere, because I’m a decent sort of girl. But that punter is mine …”
Startled, the girl said: “What’s she saying?”
Willy tried to push her away but failed.
“What am I saying? What am I saying? I’m saying you’re a rotten little tart and that you stole him off of me! I’m saying you’re not going to get away with it and that I’m going to smash your pretty face in. I’m saying … Take that for starters! … And that! … And this! …”
She went at it with a will, punching, scratching, grabbing handfuls of hair, while onlookers tried in vain to separate them.
Long Tall Jeanne was as strong as a man.
“You’ve been treating me like dirt! You were asking for it! …”
Martine did her best to fight her off, scratching back, even sinking her small teeth into the hand of her opponent, who had her by one ear.
“Calm down, ladies! … Gentlemen, please! …”
But Jeanne kept screeching at the top of her voice and managed to knock the table over. Glasses and bottles shattered. Women customers fled from the battle zone screaming while Jeanne finally succeeded in tripping the girl and putting her on the floor.
“Ah! You’ve been asking for trouble and you’ve come to the right place for it! …”
They were now both on the floor, grappling with each other, spattered with flecks of blood from cuts caused by the broken glass.
The band was playing “O Holy Night” as loudly as possible to cover the noise. Some of the customers went on singing. Eventually the door opened. Two officers from the cycle-mounted police patrol marched in and headed for the fighting women.
Unceremoniously they nudged them with the toes of their boots.
“Come on you two! On your feet!”
“It was that bitch who …”
“Shut up! You can explain down at the station …”
As chance would have it, the two men, Willy and his pal, seemed to have vanished.
“Come along with us.”
“But …” Martine protested.
“Keep your mouth shut! Save it for later!”
Long Tall Jeanne turned to look for her hat, which she had lost in the scuffle. Outside on the pavement, she called to the doorman:
“Jean, keep my hat safe for me. I’ll come and get it tomorrow. It’s almost new!”
“If you don’t keep quiet …” said one of the policemen jangling his handcuffs.
“Aw, put a sock in it, dumbo. We’ll be as good as gold!”
Martine’s legs gave way. It was only now, all of a sudden, that she started to feel sick. They had to stop in a dark recess to let her empty her stomach against a wall on which was written in white letters: “No Urinating”.
She was crying, a mixture of sobs and hiccups.
“I don’t know what’s got into her. We were having such a nice time …”
“Come off it!”
“I’d like a glass of water.”
“You’ll get one at the station.”
It wasn’t far to the police station in Rue de l’Étoile. It turned out that Lognon, the hard-done-by inspector, was still on duty. A pair of glasses was perched on his nose. He was busy, probably writing up his report about the death of the Russian. He recognized Jeanne, then the girl. He looked at each of them in turn, not understanding.
“You two knew each other?”
“Looks like it, sunshine.”
“You’re drunk!” he barked at Jeanne. “What about the friend? …”
One of the policemen explained:
“They were both rolling on the floor of the Monico, tearing each other’s hair out …”
“Inspector …” Martine started to protest.
“That’s enough! Lock ’em up till the van comes on its round.”
The men were on one side, not many, mostly old down-and-outs, and the women on the other, at the far end, separated from them by a wire grille.
There were benches along the walls. A pint-size flower-seller was crying.
“What are you here for?”
“They found cocaine in my posies. It wasn’t nothing to do with me …”
“You don’t say!”
“Who’s she?”
“A tadpole.”
“A what?”
“A tadpole. Don’t try to work it out. Careful! She’s going to throw up again. That’ll make it smell like roses in here if the paddy-wagon’s late!”
By three in the morning, there were a good hundred of them in the lockup at police HQ on Quai de l’Horloge, men still on one side and women on the other.
In thousands of houses, people were still probably dancing around Christmas trees. Digestive systems were certain to be struggling with turkey, foie gras and black pudding. The restaurants and bars would not close until it started to get light.
“Have you got the message at last, you silly cow?”
Martine was curled up on a bench as highly polished by use as any church pew. She was still feeling sick. Her features were drawn, her eyes unfocused, and her lips pursed.
“I don’t know what I ever did to you.”
“You didn’t do anything, girl.”
“You’re a common …”
“Shush! Don’t say that word in this place! Because there are several dozen of them here who might skin you alive.”
“I hate you!”
“You could be right. Even so, maybe you wouldn’t be feeling so clever at this moment if you were in some hotel room in Rue Brey!”
The girl was clearly trying to make a big effort to understand.
“Don’t bother trying to work it out! Just believe me when I say you’re better off here even if it isn’t comfortable and don’t smell so good. Come eight o’clock, the inspector will give you a short lecture that you thoroughly deserve and then you can get the Métro back to Place des Ternes. Me? They’ll give me the usual medical and take my card off me so I can’t work for a week.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh forget it! Did you really think that spending the night with that creep – and on Christmas Eve too – would have been nice? Did you? And how proud of your precious Willy you’d have been tomorrow morning! Do you really think people didn’t feel disgusted when they saw you hanging round the neck of that cheap crook? But now at least your future is still in your hands. And you have the Russian to thank for it, you know!”
“Why?”
“I dunno exactly. Just a thought. First because it was on his account that I didn’t go straight home. Then again maybe it was him who made me want to be Father Christmas for once in my life. Now move up and make room for me …”
Then she added, already more than drowsy:
“Just imagine if, once in their lives, everybody behaved like Father Christmas …”
Her voice grew softer the deeper she drifted into sleep.
“Just imagine it, right? … Just once … And when you think of how many people there are on this earth …”
Then finally, still muttering, with her head on Martine’s thigh for a pillow: “Can’t you stop your legs jumping all the time …”
Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other depicts the complexities of identity through the interconnected stories of twelve Black British women, painting a portrait of the state of contemporary Britain that also examines the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. Though Black women are not a monolith, there is something about the shared experience of a certain collection of people who identify together in gender-related experiences and the results of coming from places where colonialism—from the standpoint of the colonized and the colonizer—played an importance on how your skin color dictates how others treat you. For an African American woman who has read many British writers, reading Girl, Woman, Other was the first time I felt any affinity to such authors and their works.
It was not surprising to me that this book won the 2019 Booker Prize. Although what was surprising is that Bernardine Evaristo is the first Black woman to receive the literary honor. Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, Evaristo has written eight books that cross multiple genres and styles. Evident in Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s willingness to play with style, voice, and lyricism. I spoke with Evaristo with an “American Black woman interviews British Black woman” kind of vibe. We spoke about Girl, Woman, Other with the context of understanding it from and for a Black American reader, the similarities and differences between American and British Blackness and Black womanhood, specifically, and the depiction of such in literature.
Tyrese L Coleman: I loved this book so much and found it hard to put down. When I told a white woman I met that I would be interviewing you, she said to me that she was surprised you won the Booker Prize but when I read Girl, Woman, Other, I knew exactly why you won the Booker Prize. I also read where a BBC anchor referred to you as “another author” when discussing the shared award with Margaret Atwood. Both incidents made me wonder whether or not you have noticed a racial and/or gender divide in the book’s criticism and, specifically, the reaction to you winning the award. If so, why do you think that is?
Bernardine Evaristo: I’m glad you enjoyed the novel so much. I’ve had very little feedback from individual American readers, mainly because the novel came out much later there. You don’t say whether the woman mentioned had read the novel or not—which makes a difference. People have opinions on the Booker Prize shortlists and winners without actually having read all the books. Or they’ve read one and decided that book is their favorite, without knowing anything about the competition. I’ve had incredibly positive responses from all kinds of readers to Girl, Woman, Other and since winning the Booker, the novel has gone out into the world to land in the laps of readers who wouldn’t usually read my work, even if they came across it. In the U.K. the main reading market is older and female, but since winning the prize my events have also been packed with men, often elderly men, some of whom have already read the book and loved it. I find this incredibly reassuring in the sense that they are responding to the humanity in my work and that they have encountered my twelve primarily Black British women and found them interesting and perhaps, even, relatable. We are all human beings, after all, with shared emotional drivers.
TLC: As an American who is slightly an anglophile (meaning, I watch a significant amount of British television and movies and am specifically obsessed with The Crown), Girl, Woman, Other felt familiar to me. Not because of what I think I know about what it means to be English, but rather what I know about what it means to be a Black woman. I was drawn to those moments of knowing that feel unique to Black womanhood, such as Carole’s constant respectability performance as she is surrounded by white people daily, especially white men, and her struggle to outperform just to remain equal.
I find myself and I see other Black women always saying, “we aren’t a monolith,” but we do have shared and relatable experiences. What were you hoping to say about the shared experience of Black women?
BE: As Black women in the U.K. and U.S., we will share certain experiences in that we are living in societies where we are racialized and where women are also discriminated against. My novel explores many women, one of whom is non-binary, from multiple perspectives, and this includes experiences of queer and straight sexuality, different classes, occupations, family set-ups, and cultural backgrounds, migration histories, rural and metropolitan women, and women of every generation through to a nonagenarian, and so on. My aim was to create as many stories as I could about Black British women and in so doing to counteract our invisibility in literature to present my characters as complex, flawed, and very real beings. All of these areas lattice across the text, so that while the novel is specific to individual narratives, there are so many points of connection for the reader, especially for Black women readers, and women of color more generally.
TLC: What are some similarities and differences between American and British Blackness and Black womanhood as they are depicted in literature, specifically?
BE: I don’t claim to be an expert on this and I’d hate to generalize, but I can talk more widely about the differences between the U.K. Black experience and its American counterpart. The recorded history of Black Britain goes back to the Roman occupation of two thousand years ago (something I wrote about in my 2001 novel, The Emperor’s Babe and picks up in a big way from the 16th century, but we don’t have Black ancestry here with unbroken lineage beyond the 12th century.
I can count the number of Black British women novelists publishing today on two hands.
Most people of color in the U.K. arrived post-WWII so our lived history is very recent compared to America’s history of four hundred plus years of African Americans. We are also a small minority in terms of race in this country. There are about 2 million people of African descent here, as opposed to some 40 million in the U.S. This is reflected in our literature, with little of it and most of which was very male-dominated until the 90s, with Black women putting in rare appearances, most notably in the works of Nigerian novelist, Buchi Emecheta, who migrated to the U.K. in the 60s.
It’s really only in the past 20 years that we’ve seen more Black female presence in U.K. literature, but certainly not enough of it. I can count the number of Black British women novelists publishing today on two hands. The same can’t be said for the U.S. In the 90s young Black British women writers were writing similarly young protagonists in coming-of-age novels. Most of those writers disappeared. Since then we’ve had a few writers writing Black female protagonists who are still mainly young, also urban and contemporary. African American women’s fiction and literature—which so inspired my younger self—far outperforms our own production here in the U.K. in terms of the quantity of this work. One of my aims with Girl, Woman, Other was to break through these limitations. I think any wider comparison with the U.S. will require something of an academic thesis.
TLC: In your interview with the New York Times, you talk about writing about the African diaspora. Girl, Woman, Other, are stories about womxn whose parents or grandparents immigrated or worked in England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dominique was the only character where it was mentioned that her ancestry could be traced back to slavery and Hattie’s lineage included slave traders, but otherwise, that part of the diaspora is not explored very much.
Coming from an American perspective where so much of our literature involves slavery, even when it is about other aspects of the diaspora, I am curious about your decision not to touch heavily upon the impact of slavery for Black British people—slavery in England and the slave trade outside of it involving the English.
BE: I’m not sure why my novel should draw more on the slave trade when it’s not a novel looking that deeply into British history. And if there’s one aspect of Black British history that continues to be mined in all media, it’s the transatlantic slave trade, to the extent that it alone is synonymous with our history, even though, as I said earlier, our history goes much deeper. My novel is about British women living in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it delves to some extent into their ancestry but it’s touch on slavery is light, as it should be. Britain was a major player in the transatlantic slave trade but there weren’t that many slaves living in the U.K., rather they were in the West Indies. Some of the women in my novel have Caribbean origins and some have direct African origins. Many, many writers continue to explore the slave trade and indeed my own 2008 novel, Blonde Roots, is all about slavery—a satirical inversion of this slave trade where Africans enslave Europeans. It’s very much an indictment of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. My focus with Girl, Woman, Other was to explore so many more areas of our lives that go under the radar.
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