Page 378 – Electric Literature

A Power Ranking of Sherlock Holmes Adaptations

Posted on July 25, 2019July 24, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

When I came to write The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, a book peopled with famous literary characters, I was very excited to create my own version of Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t alone. Since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story, in 1887, there have been hundreds—perhaps thousands—of adaptations, retellings, studies, and spin-offs related to the famous detective. Something about Sherlock Holmes remains a perpetual well of inspiration. He is more than a detective; he is the Victorian equivalent of a superhero: both cleverer and physically stronger than a normal human, protecting England from murder and blackmail and spectral hounds through the power of science and deductive reasoning. And yet he is also more than an archetype: his mood swings, his love of the violin, his drug use, and his deep friendship with Dr Watson give him real complexity, and the fact we see him almost solely through Watson’s narration makes it impossible to judge what goes on beneath the surface of his mind. He’s irresistible.

With over 250 Holmes adaptations on screen alone (according to Guinness World Records), this list could never be definitive. Billy Wilder’s utterly bizarre The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), for instance, is equally deserving of a mention; so is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), based on the book of the same name, or Murder by Decree (1979), wherein Christopher Plummer’s Holmes investigates Jack the Ripper. And that’s without mentioning any of the radio dramas, or the stage versions, including two musicals and a ballet. (Yes, a ballet.) But these twelve adaptations, all iconic in their own way, explore different facets of Sherlock Holmes; together, they testify to the character’s infinite adaptability. Here they are, in order from worst to best.

Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary

12. Elementary (2012–2019, Holmes played Jonny Lee Miller)

This is more of a U.S. version of Sherlock than a genuine Holmes adaptation (as signified by their decision to title the show after Holmes’s most famous quote-that-he-never-really-said), but it makes some bold moves of its own. The series reimagines Sherlock Holmes as a recovering drug addict and police consultant in New York, and adds a number of new elements to his persona, including a past with MI6 and numerous father issues. (His father is played by John Noble, who was also Denethor in the Lord of the Rings films, so issues are understandable.) Compared to Sherlock, the references can feel flat and obvious, even gimmicky. Yet Jonny Lee Miller’s performance is quirky and energetic, and the series makes commendable efforts to create and update roles for women, albeit in a way that arguably plays into a whole new set of stereotypes: from Lucy Liu as Watson, to combining the characters of Irene Adler and Moriarty into one “femme fatale” played by Natalie Dormer, to the inclusion of Kitty Winter, one of Conan Doyle’s most fascinating yet underused female characters. And, with seven seasons of 24 episodes each, Miller has long since become the longest-serving Holmes, making him an important contribution to the canon.

Tom Baker in The Hound of the Baskervilles

11. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, Holmes played by Tom Baker)

Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes have always had a close literary relationship, from the Tom Baker-era Victorian pastiche The Talons of Weng Chiang to Steven Moffatt’s tenure producing both Doctor Who and Sherlock simultaneously. This is perhaps the closest brush between the two: not only does the Fourth Doctor Tom Baker star as Sherlock Holmes, but Doctor Who producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks reunited to bring this multi-part adaptation to the screen. It ought to be better than it is, frankly, but what it is still works well. Baker delivers a compelling if subdued performance, and the script is faithful. It just lacks a spark.

10. Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962, Holmes played by Christopher Lee)

This an odd West German/French/Italian co-production, loosely based on The Valley of Fear. Christopher Lee played Holmes twice more after this, in two television films; Thorley Walters played Dr. Watson in three further completely unrelated films (two of them comedies). I’m picking on this film because it was both actors’ first time at the roles, as well as their only time together, and they’re very good. Deadly Necklace itself is not a great film. The English version suffers from poor dubbing; the plot is serviceable but drags at times; the humor is often forced. I don’t know why Holmes is obsessed with The Times. But Christopher Lee has unmatched gravitas, and he uses Holmes’s disguises to great effect (even when the plot doesn’t really justify them). The confrontations with Hans Söhnker as Moriarty have real tension. It’s good fun.

9. Sherlock Holmes (2009, Holmes played by Robert Downey, Jr.)

This film and its sequel A Game of Shadows (2011) take a different slant on Holmes, emphasizing his action-hero skills and bohemian eccentricity to create a larger than life, comic book version of Conan Doyle’s hero and world. It could have been a disaster, but Robert Downey’s charisma and the prickly chemistry between him and Jude Law as Watson mostly carry it over the bumps, and the villains and set design are gloriously over-the-top. It isn’t faithful or even particularly witty, and it isn’t trying to be—though the script’s focus on the conflict between science and magic pick up nicely on the themes of the Victorian gothic.

Dr. Dawson and Basil in The Great Mouse Detective

8. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

Yes, really. This film is underrated as a clever, playful take on the Holmes canon, and moreover, it’s plain hilarious. Based on the children’s book series Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus, Basil is a mouse who lives under the floors at 221B Baker Street—the real Holmes and Watson are glimpsed at points throughout the film. Their world replicates that of Victorian London, complete with smoky pubs and a mouse Queen Victoria. Basil (voiced by Barrie Ingham) homages Holmes’s quirks beautifully, from his mood swings to his enthusiasm for disguises to his discomfiture at strong emotion, while Vincent Price steals the show as the voice of the dastardly Professor Ratigan. Dawson, the Watson mouse, is frankly adorable. The climax takes places behind the clock face of Big Ben and there are clockwork robots. Who wouldn’t love this?

7. Sherlock Holmes film series (1931–1937, Holmes played by Arthur Wontner)

Arthur Wontner was born in 1875 (old enough to have read the Holmes stories as they came out), and was technically too old for the part even in the first of the five Holmes films he made. The later productions wisely lean into this rather than trying to disguise it: Wontner is a genial, friendly aging Holmes, and Ian Fleming is a likable Watson, though he risks disappearing from the plot at times. The banter between them is gentle and sweet. (For The Sign of Four Fleming was replaced by Ian Hunter.)

Most of the films are very faithful to the source texts. The exception is the final film, Silver Blaze (U.S.: Murder at the Baskervilles), which is charmingly bananas. Holmes and Watson are doing a straightforward adaptation of “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” albeit rewritten as a sequel to Hound of the Baskervilles. Meanwhile, however, Moriarty and Moran are sneaking around in the hedges like Dick Dastardly and Muttly trying to gatecrash the plot. They finally manage to derail “Silver Blaze” entirely by kidnapping Watson, whom they threaten to throw down a disused elevator shaft. But Holmes saves the day by (spoilers, I’m sorry, I can’t help it) fixing the elevator and descending to the rescue. If this sounds like something you would like to see, then you should.

6. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1979–1986, Holmes played by Vasily Livanov)

This series of five Soviet television films has become iconic for its accuracy to the source material, its atmospheric production design, and the performances of the cast, headed by Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr. Watson. In the U.K., Livanov was made an honorary MBE for his portrayal of Holmes, the only Russian actor ever to be so honored, while in Moscow a statue to Holmes and Watson as portrayed by the films’ lead actors stands near the British embassy. I’ve only seen fragments of this, but both actors’ commitment to the mannerisms of their characters (Livanov’s quicksilver energy and intellect, Solomin’s quiet composure) and the unmistakable chemistry between the two is impressive.

5. Sherlock Holmes TV series (1965–1968, Holmes played by Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing)

This series was beset by production difficulties, which contributed to Douglas Wilmer leaving after one series and Peter Cushing coming to replace him. If their performances suffer, however, it doesn’t show. Wilmer’s depiction of the great detective is still warmly regarded by Holmes fans. Cushing, who had played the role previously, is similarly a delightful Holmes: deceptively unassuming, yet capable of turning to steel when the villains are unmasked. He and Nigel Stock as Watson (who also played alongside Wilmer) have a touching friendship that underscores Holmes’s loneliness: in “The Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes’s delight at seeing Watson at Christmas and his overwhelmed surprise that Watson has brought him a present is very moving. Cumberbatch and Brett (to a lesser extent) have so thoroughly entrenched the idea of Holmes as a cold, calculating borderline-sociopath that it’s easy to forget how rarely he has in fact been played that way.

4. Mr. Holmes (2015, Holmes played by Ian McKellen)

This is a controversial entry, especially as the film doesn’t even adapt Holmes canon directly but is instead based on Mitch Cullen’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. I don’t care. This film is a masterpiece. McKellen plays a 93-year old Holmes, retired in Sussex Downs and struggling with memory loss; the plot slides between the “present” of 1947 and Holmes’s unreliable memories of his last case 30 years earlier. McKellen’s performance in both times is exceptional, at times heartbreakingly vulnerable, and at others dry, witty, and keenly insightful. This film is truly about Sherlock Holmes: as a person, as a fictional character, and the line between the two. It explores the tension between Holmes’s passion for truth and his growing understanding of the power of story. It’s about loss (in one haunting sequence, Holmes visits Hiroshima), but it’s ultimately a gentle, joyful film about memory and legacy. I don’t know how they did this, but it’s beautiful.

3. Sherlock Holmes film series (1939–1946, Holmes played by Basil Rathbone)

Basil Rathbone, with Nigel Bruce as his loyal Watson by his side, played Holmes across fourteen films (and over 200 radio shows), and he is arguably the first iconic film version of the detective. While the early films are set in Victorian England, the later films are often original stories and foreshadow Sherlock in being updated to the present day—in this case, WWII. These stories are imaginative and fun, stretching the limits of what Holmes can do and establishing him, as the opening titles state, as a hero “ageless, invincible, and unchanging.” Yet the real strength is in the performances. Rathbone is magnificent: commanding, gentlemanly, fiercely intelligent yet capable of warmth and kindness. Nigel Bruce reinvents Watson as a bumbling, sweet-natured comic sidekick—a characterization untrue to the Conan Doyle stories, but revolutionary in giving Watson a defined role and purpose that was often missing from earlier adaptations. (Besides, his duck impressions are funny.) And, as is true of all the best adaptations, the chemistry between the two actors is perfect.

2. Sherlock (2010–2017, Holmes played by Benedict Cumberbatch)

If the Granada Holmes series is a study in faithfulness to Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock is a postmodern pastiche of those stories, bringing Sherlock Holmes into the modern world. Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance is electric, all tumbling curls and cheekbones and arrogance and intellect. Martin Freeman’s irritable, defensive army-doctor-turned-blogger John Watson serves as our viewpoint on Sherlock from the start, as Watson does in the stories, and the rapport between the two is one of the show’s many strengths: it’s perhaps the only adaptation where Watson seems to carry as much dramatic weight as Holmes. The production is revolutionary in the way it dramatizes Sherlock’s deductions, through various on-screen depictions of his “mind palace”: for the first time, we’re able to see him thinking. The best thing about the show, however, just might be the writing. When this show is at its best, it’s truly brilliant, not just in itself but in the way it constantly embraces and playfully subverts its own source material—at times, such as in the early acts of in Scandal in Belgravia and His Last Vow, the references to Conan Doyle stories and previous Holmes adaptations cascade so thick and so fast that keeping up with them feels like trying to snatch at falling snow. The result is something very special: at once homage to Sherlock Holmes canon, an exploration of that canon, and a definitive Holmes adaptation in its own right.

1. Sherlock Holmes TV series (1984–1994, Holmes played by Jeremy Brett)

This famous Granada series teems with loving detail: from the scripts, which faithfully adapt the original stories, to the set design, costumes, and cinematography, which often replicate frame-for-frame artist Sidney Paget’s original illustrations. The most extraordinary details, however, can be found in Jeremy Brett’s performance. Brett researched the part meticulously, and delivers a portrayal that brings out not only Holmes’s intellect but his full psychological complexity. At times startlingly dramatic, at other times subtle and nuanced, Brett’s Holmes is a study in contradictions: prone to dark moods yet also flashes of contagious laughter, languid one moment and the next twitching with barely contained energy, majestic and arresting and brimming with charisma. When he’s on screen, it’s impossible to look anywhere else. He is ably supported by his two Watsons, David Burke in the first series and Edward Hardwicke from then on: Burke is a slightly younger, more sarcastic Watson, while Hardwicke brings a gentle kindness to the part. The later episodes were sadly hindered by Jeremy Brett’s failing health (he suffered from bipolar disorder and a heart condition), which led to his tragically early death before he could complete the series. His legacy, however, is a production which can quite rightly considered the definitive on-screen representation of Sherlock Holmes.

Why Are So Many Women Rewriting Fairy Tales?

Posted on July 25, 2019July 29, 2019 by Jennifer Baker

Peg Alford Pursell’s second book, A Girl Goes into the Forest, contains a collection of 78 short stories exploring moments in the lives of women. Pursell’s first book, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow, was named the 2017 INDIES Book of the Year for Literary Fiction and an honorable mention in fiction for the First Horizon Award.

What captivates about Pursell’s work is how she uses brevity and specificity to fully immerse readers in the worlds of her characters, regular people facing everyday problems. Most stories feel like a flash into a world, a photograph, while others linger, giving their stories room to breathe into their fullness. She writes about loss, longing, frustration, and simple pleasures, tackling problems some might call small, but Pursell approaches her characters with reverence, honoring the depth of the pain we all carry. By darting in and out so quickly from each story, Pursell must use the compact details of each character’s world to help readers grasp onto. Some stories are under a hundred words, focusing on a cake melting in the sun (“Under the Accumulating Sunset”) or a woman facing down icy winds (“The Woman in the Winter Storm”), while others like “My Father and His Beautiful Slim Brunettes”) span pages and lifetimes.

Peg Alford Pursell and I sat down to talk about mother-daughter relationships, the impact of world events on how we tell stories, and the lines between poetry and prose and the nonbinary future of writing.

Parrish Turner: As I was reading through A Girl Goes into the Forest, I was struck with the question: What is the difference between poetry and prose?

Peg Alford Pursell: I definitely work with what I think of as hybrids, which includes prose poetry. It straddles a line between traditional short story writing or novel writing and poetry.

One of the main differences is in lyricism and I’m a writer who is driven by the sounds of language. I will frequently start something because a phrase sticks in my mind. Hybrids encompass flash fiction and prose poetry. There are so many different animals and I think mine are much more language based.

PT: The language is so beautiful throughout. I have found that after readings, some people will compliment me on my poetry, which is not something I think I write. Where are we drawing this line?

It is just the nonbinary nature of this kind of writing. It doesn’t want to stay in this category or that.

PAP: I heard that with my first book in particular. It is a much shorter book and I didn’t include longer, full stories. Someone asked me why I didn’t publish it as poetry. This is why I refer to them as hybrids.

It is just the nonbinary nature of this kind of writing. It doesn’t want to stay in this category or that. It seems to be what I am able to write most naturally. I have a hard time with categorization.

In a way, we are starting to really pay attention to the fact that in nature, in people, these binaries really aren’t binaries. For example, there is not a point at which night becomes day. You can’t pinpoint any specific moment. It is always more or less night or more or less day. As a culture, I hope we are waking up more and more to the realities. It is only natural that our writing and our art forms will reflect that more and more.

PT: It makes me also think about how “traditional” fairy tales are often structured as poems. I wonder when the delineation began? But, speaking of fairy tales, your book is filled with those influences, which I have also seen pop up more and more. What do you think the value of fairy tales is today? Why this renewed interest?

PAP: I was thinking of this myself and there are so many theories. But the way it came to me, to use these epigraphs from the fairy tale, I had in the back of my mind: Which of these fairy tales do we find that the girl has agency? So “The Snow Queen” came to me because it is Gerta that saves little Kay, the boy.

I don’t know if revival is the right word, but there is something in the air where we are seeing a lot of people rewriting fairy tales. It is mostly women writers, people who identify as women doing this. Why is that?

There is an interesting desire to look back on what was and change it. Recreate it. Subvert it.

I have a lot of different ideas about it. It could be about getting back to our “roots.” A lot of these fairy tales are the kind of lore that is early, culturally [speaking]. Centuries ago. Maybe we are looking to see how this body of lore established itself. I see many women rewriting these tales in a way that is very much in keeping with what women are doing in this culture now. There is a lot of upheaval, certainly politically and in the environment. Our planet is changing dramatically and we are asking: Are we going to survive? There is a desire to look back on what was and change it. Recreate it. Subvert it. Make it ours for this day and age.

PT: How does the wider world influence what you write and how much does time interact with the two? Your book is so relevant today and aware, for example, I saw you thanked Dr. Blasey Ford in your acknowledgments, yet it takes time to write and publish a book. What is the tension there?

PAP: I submitted this book a year ago in March, so it followed quickly behind the first book. Most of it was written in a nine-month period. When I first start, I have no idea what I am writing. I like it that way. I like the mystery. I like giving myself permission to see where I will go. In some ways, it’s nerve-wracking, and in other ways, it is liberating too. I want to see what I really think about something. Once I get a sense of it, then the rest begins to aim for the same themes.

I did acknowledge Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. At the time I was finishing up the manuscript to go into galleys, the hearings were taking place. Like many, I was overwhelmed by her courage, what she had to endure, and very upset with the outcome. What she did took so much courage and I took so much inspiration from that. I didn’t want that to be forgotten. When we are living in such politically turbulent times; everything is happening so fast and it is easy for us to forget about these really monumental things. I wanted to have what she did acknowledged so that if we are still around, if books still exist a decade from now, someone will see and remember.

Christine Blasey Ford’s bravery parallels the characters in my stories—they have an internal moral compass.

I think that also her bravery parallels a lot of what I feel the characters in my stories are—they have a strong internal moral compass. They are very brave in situations that are a double bind and they are usually put in situations where there is no way out but these characters find their own ways.

PT: One of the things I loved was the variety of characters. So many of these stories center on the mother-daughter relationship and its difficulties. Have your views on that dynamic shifted over the years? What would these stories have looked like if you had written them 20 years ago, and what would you be exploring?

PAP: I think the mother-daughter relationships are absolutely affected by the fact that we live in a patriarchal society. Many women do not realize—I think this is true for a huge generation of women—they don’t realize that we have internalized the misogyny. I am very curious [about] what is going to happen in this next election. Well, it is a lot more intense feeling than curiosity. There are some women who cannot accept a woman president. That is internalized misogyny. This plays out in the mother-daughter relationship.

I try to get that across with my characters: there is a sense of betrayal. Why didn’t you let me know that this is the way it is going to be? As characters become teenagers, there is a real upset with the older women who, in their perception, haven’t done anything to change this situation. This is all a very subtle thing. It doesn’t speak across the board, but I do think, for myself, I had an older brother and I just remember that at a certain point I realized he was being treated special because he was a boy. He was 18 months older and I knew he wasn’t special because he was a boy. In kindergarten, I tried to talk to my teacher about this. I didn’t have the exact language for it. But essentially asked why does the boy get to be elevated simply because he is a boy and [I have] to accept that this is the way of the world? I wasn’t able to get answers when I talked to my teacher or my mother. I think they had their own anger or upset about it. But the idea is that you have to accept this in order to get along. When you get older you can do these things to try to make a difference but the bottom line is that, as a girl, you have to accept that this is the world we live in. That is a very difficult dynamic but I think it underpins the mother-daughter relationship. I think all women have had so much pain and how do mothers deal with and how do daughters see that. We are still dealing with the same problems.

7 Unconventional Missing Person Stories

Posted on July 25, 2019July 22, 2019 by Jo Lou

Consider it the first mystery of the missing that they are said to “go” somewhere, somewhere called “missing.” Or maybe missing is less a place, more of a gerund. The abducted and kidnapped go missing the way the rest of us go running, skating, and skipping, making missing a sport you could almost imagine at the Olympics. But if to miss is to misdirect—wouldn’t an Olympic misser be able to land an arrow anywhere but the center of the target? Maybe a world-class misser would miss the mark so astoundingly as to accidentally assassinate the judge, or pierce her own heart?

Marilou Is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith — Buy the book

Some hallmarks of the missing-person story: It’s told from the perspective of the people or community left behind, establishing a sane and true world as a foil for the unknowable negative space the missing person has stepped into. The missing person no longer speaks, except from their own past—in letters, found evidence, or their own words recalled by their intimates. And so very, very often the missing person is female, and her disappearance is somehow a referendum on purity and wholesomeness—not just her own, but the community’s as well.

My novel Marilou Is Everywhere begins with a familiar plot: a teenage girl, Jude, disappears shortly after high school graduation. While the investigation (and gossip) unfolds, another teenage girl sees a chance to leave a precarious situation in her own home, and slips into Jude’s life. The book’s mystery wanders away from the idea of pursuing a single criminal responsible for the disappearance, instead asking how society has already failed to see these women. Maybe they were missing a long time before they disappeared.

I’m a reader who loves to turn the pages, and missing-person stories are my catnip. But I especially love books that diffuse the basic ingredients of this narrative in ways that point out how going missing can be merely the end result of a chronic absence—of care, attention, understanding, or visibility.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

All of Bolaño’s work, in my estimation, invokes the dread of emptiness or cosmic violence, but nowhere as brutally as in 2666, the fourth part of which recounts the disappearance of murdered and mutilated women in Santa Teresa, presumably the book’s proxy for Ciudad Juárez. It is by far the longest section in the book, both horrible and banal.

2666 is a feast of genres: campus novel, love story, mystery, history. But the recitation of circumstances surrounding the missing women act as a counterbalance, an echoing pit beneath the rest of the book. The narrative does, in a way, bend toward a single evildoer, but it also hints at a broader culpability, asking how that cavernous violence undergirds art and the sublime.

Image result for nobody is ever missing a novel

Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

Elyria walks right out of her life one day, leaving Manhattan for New Zealand, leaving a husband and a job and all the materials of normal life for an acquaintance’s proffered spare room on a farm. Instead of tracking her disappearance from the perspective of those left behind, the novel follows her as she disappears—and she does so more or less continuously. Her elliptical observations eventually reveal that grief over her sister Ruby’s suicide may be what unfastened her from her life. Is every traveler merely in the midst of a constant disappearing act? In a sharp and wonderful reversal, it’s almost as if Elyria’s life has gone missing from her, not the other way around.

Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson

Nelson’s aunt Jane Mixter was murdered while studying law at the University of Michigan in 1969, the subsequent investigation and trial further investigated in Nelson’s also excellent The Red Parts. But Jane: A murder undertakes a different kind of recovery project, one in which Nelson integrates text from Mixter’s journals—sometimes as interjections, and sometimes as whole poems. Occasionally the poems conjure the circumstances around Jane’s death as if they were portents—Jane, as a character in the sequence “The Light of the Mind,” dreams that she discovers a new freckle on her forehead that transforms into a gunshot wound. Another section recounts the circumstances of Jane’s murder, but Nelson structures the book so that interjections from Jane’s papers comment upon the reportage with an uncanny impossibility. Following the family’s shock at identifying her body, this note from her journals: “I can become a very tragic figure in my own mind/if I don’t make an effort to be gay.” Jane somehow seems to go more missing the more Nelson discovers about her.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I confess, I thoroughly enjoyed watching my peers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop fuss and nitpick over this book after it came out. It seemed that something so basic as a plot twist had been long discounted as utterly pedestrian, and it was delicious to watch so many people wonder, often with a note of panic, whether there might be something to these page-turners after all. Or perhaps I’m projecting? I like an obtuse German-language book-length meditation on suicide and wood ducks as much as the next MFA, but I also love compulsively readable books. And I had found it frustrating to hear (more than once) other writers dismiss popular books as some kind of collective delusion rather than a canny demonstration of narrative spellcraft. (And doesn’t everyone know that popular books are a combination of the two?)

It’s nothing short of gruesome, how powerfully the missing woman story baits a reader like me into racing through this novel, and I appreciated it for deftly closing the door behind me halfway through and confronting me with the blindness that so often accompanies a reader’s hunger for such a story. Despite the tricksy plot, Amy is still the missing girl in here, made so at first when her parents replace her with Amazing Amy, their idealized chapter book heroine, and then again at her own hand, when she conjures a Cool Girl version of herself to seduce her husband.

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

The only appropriate way to describe this book is to note that it’s the first and only that made me check the deadbolt on my door multiple times while reading it. Like the best cosmic horror, it carries at its center a piece of knowledge which has contaminated and harmed the characters who encounter it, including David, who has been soul-swapped by a witch doctor, and Amanda, blind in a hospital bed. David relentlessly questions Amanda: she must remember the exact moment when the worms entered her body. Her recall grows flimsier as he nudges the story out of her. Some part of herself seems to be disappearing, the same part which disappeared from David. As a reader, I want to know what happened, but is it possible to know without falling under the same spell? It seems not, and every page turned feels like a step toward my own split from consciousness.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

It’s supposed to be a nightmare scenario to discover that a book engaged with very similar materials as your own is coming out a few months earlier—especially if it’s like, really really good. But I was delighted to read this layered anti-investigation of the disappearance of two girls from the remote Kamchatka province in Eastern Russia. Functioning as a series of linked stories as much as a novel, the book slips the missing girls into the background of each subsequent section, ghostly and filtered through the discourse of other stories. They show up as cautionary tales, asides, metaphors, a rationale for bigoted lamentations about the presence of “outsiders,” but those other stories offer sly illumination of the broader cultural setting that makes their disappearance possible.

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil

In 1979, Ban is a black girl walking home from school during the beginning of a race riot in the Southall suburb of London where the anti-Nazi activist Blair Peach will be murdered by the end of the night. When Ban hears the first sounds of struggle, she lies down on the ground where she’s walking. But to call that a plot would be to miss, well, just about everything in this book. Some parts are notes for a performance piece. Some are refractions of the narrative, retellings, attempts which begin and begin and begin in search of something silent and crucial about what this violence does to black and brown bodies.

Ban disappears in the sense that she transubstantiates: “Ban is a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash) scraped off the soles of running shoes: Puma, Reebok, Adidas. // Looping the city, Ban is a warp of smoke.” She is everywhere. The sound of shattering glass, in turn, shatters her, and time becomes multiple. A summary is impossible because this book frustrates every hierarchical imperative imaginable. So fuck this attempt: Please just read it.

Where Is Revolution City?

Posted on July 24, 2019March 3, 2020 by Erin Bartnett

“No One Knew That”
by Hadiya Hussein, translated by Paul Starkey

I sat down, after thirty years, on a wooden bench with crumbling edges. The square in front of me seemed empty and the colour of the buildings was fading . . . My clothes bag was opposite the bench, by my side was a bag with remains of food inside it. I looked at the still leafless bushes (despite the fact that we were in mid-spring), turning over in my mind the pictures my memory had retained. I could find no clear resemblance or similarity to what I was seeing. Everything had become old and worn out. I was coming back after thirty years with a skin whose cells no longer renewed themselves.

The bus that had carried me from Amman to Baghdad had dropped me in this place. Most passengers had got out, though a few stayed on. I had hesitated before getting out, staring from the bus window.

“I want to go to Madinat al-Thawra [Revolution City],” I said to the driver.

He looked at me without comment. I repeated what I’d just said, as perhaps I’d got the name wrong. When his eyes carried on staring curiously, I got out in a quadrangular square.

A number of men were offering their services. Drivers, porters, and children selling mastic and water. Everyone was talking quickly, using vocabulary that hadn’t found its way into the dictionary of my memory before, so that it was difficult for me to distinguish the letters. The faces were strange and emaciated, and the place that was supposed to be the al-Alawi Bus Station bore no resemblance to its previous layout. The driver’s assistant got out all the luggage. After the passengers had gone off in their different directions, I started looking carefully at the place.

Four entry roads led into long streets that ended I knew not where. Entry no. 1 had a number of policemen standing by it and the way to it was blocked by concrete ramparts. I picked up my case and did not look at anyone, for I had uneasy feelings about the suspicious faces.

There was a woman about to get into a taxi. I hurried up to her and started to ask her: “How can I get to Revolution City?”

She looked at me without replying. Her look suggested that she hadn’t understood the question, so I repeated it a second time, but she had already got into the back seat and shut the door hurriedly as if she was running away from me.

The square had a low barrier around it, from behind which buildings could be seen – restaurants and cheap hotels. After a few minutes, the north corner filled up with skinny soldiers, smoking furiously. They sat down in a row on the barrier. They didn’t exchange any conversation, as if they had already said all they had to say on the way there, and were just waiting for the lorry to take them off – or perhaps they were too busy talking to themselves. Were they returning from their units in the far north and wanting to get to their homes in the south? Or were they on their way to those units?

I noticed a boy around ten years old, wearing coffee-coloured trousers torn at the knees, and a shirt that was too big for him. He didn’t say anything. I opened my bag and gave him an orange and a piece of biscuit. He carried on looking at me for a few moments before stretching out his hand and snatching what I was holding, then running off in case anyone saw him, as if he’d just committed a robbery. From time to time, people would come out of one of the entry roads and cross the square towards the other entries. Sullen, twitching people. Two of them started a fight, while a woman wearing a shiny dress stood beside them, her long red hair reaching to her waist. While they were trading blows and insults, she slipped into the entry labelled no. 2. Time was passing quickly, and night was slowly advancing, to cover the sky and everything else.

I said to myself: “I must find out where I am. To find that out, I shall have to walk a few metres to check the right way. And if I’m to avoid laying myself open to undesirable consequences, I shall have to avoid asking questions.”

I picked up my bag and walked towards the entry road that the woman with the red hair and shiny dress had disappeared into. I had to pass along some narrow paths before I arrived at a wide street lit by lanterns suspended from medium height poles. I don’t know whether the light they gave out was from paraffin, or if they were electric lamps in the shape of lanterns. I saw several signs invoking blessings on ‘Adherence to Principles and Great Victories’. The poles and house fronts were adorned with pictures of a single man with stern features, and decorations of palm branches and coloured paper. Some of the windows in the houses were lit but most were in darkness. While I was trying to take in the scene, a dog barked behind a mud barrier and threw fear into my limbs. I took a couple of steps back so as to be prepared if it attacked me, though I am not very courageous in circumstances like this. I was thinking of going back to the square when a middle-aged man came out of one of the houses. I was about to call him, but he quickly went back into the houses he’d come out of as if he’d forgotten something. A long time passed but he didn’t re-emerge. That meant that he hadn’t forgotten something. Perhaps he just preferred to stay in that house until morning.

The number of soldiers had increased, and others arrived a few minutes later. New passengers were getting off a bus, heading either for the entry roads or for the taxis lined up on one side. I walked towards entry number 3. As soon as I had passed through the stone-sided passageway I found myself in front of some wretched houses made of corrugated iron sheets, from which revolting smells were being given off. Smoke from stoves was wafting out from between the cracks. I walked on several metres, wondering: “Could the driver have made a mistake and dropped me at the wrong place?” But I remember my voice was quite clear when I told him I wanted to go to Revolution City.

It’s true that he had looked at me curiously, which led me to repeat what I had said in case the man was hard of hearing, but his assistant quickly unloaded the baggage, which meant that it must have been the last stop, as I knew it thirty years ago. The roads branched off from it to the smaller cities, including Revolution City. Nothing in the place had any connection with the al-Alawi Bus Station, or with anywhere I’d known before. Cities, like people, become old and worn out and change, and I knew that what had happened during these years was enough to obliterate what had been there before.

I ventured into a corridor that was almost dark, ending in a desk behind which was sitting a youth with unhealthy looking features. I had already read the sign ‘Memories Hotel’. The youth was surprised when I went in and even more surprised by my request. “A room, please!”

I didn’t enquire about the price for a night or the services offered. I simply wanted to rest my body after several hours’ exhausting travel, and save myself from the night that had found its way into every inch of the place.

“It’s not allowed to take women . . . This is a hotel that just gives quick service for soldiers.”

I couldn’t think of a reply, but he continued: “It looks as if you’re a stranger, so you can stay until morning, even though it’s against orders and I could face dismissal as a punishment.”

I was about to say that I wasn’t a stranger, I was a native of the country, but as soon as I started to speak, he started coughing violently. When he finished, he said: “Payment in advance . . .”

I took out a hundred-dollar bill. He looked at me, but before he could open his mouth I said: “I’ve just arrived and I haven’t had time to change it.”

He put out his hand and took the bill with trembling fingers. Then he got up from behind the desk to escort me to the room.

Ever since the Dutch doctor had told me that a malignant disease was creeping through my body, I had resolved to return to find myself a grave beside the graves of my family. Until this moment, I hadn’t fallen into the trap of nostalgia. I hadn’t carried photos with me when I left my country. Photographs sharpen the pangs of memory, and I wanted to start my life far from the sufferings of the past. I’d succeeded in keeping heart and mind away from everything that would make me prey to a slow death. I became acclimatised to the strange people in a strange country, and later began to boast of how well I could speak their language. I worked and loved. I dreamed of starting a big family to compensate for my own family that had perished beneath the rubble of their house during the second Gulf War. Ten years passed which I spent with my husband, but we stayed just the two of us, despite repeated attempts with the most famous doctors.

God was not satisfied with that, but took my husband to him and left me to turn my memories into food to sustain me later. Despite that, I didn’t fall prey to the past. I launched into life after every fall with a stronger will. My life was punctuated by warm friendships and lots of journeys. The homeland used to come into my mind like a beautiful dream that didn’t stop for long and didn’t ask anyone to stop. It passed as men’s faces pass, brought together by the friendship of a journey which soon ends. In this way I trained my feelings and perfected the game of forgetting, or pretending to forget, in the crush of other years whose days I could not count. But, from the time the Dutch doctor told me the truth about my illness, memory opened its doors and cleared away the debris slowly, so that nostalgia arose from its resting place and announced its scourge of fire. The graveyard of Najaf began to appear to me as if I had left it yesterday, the day the corpses of my mother, father and younger sister were buried. I didn’t want my body to find rest amongst strangers. That is the decision I made, and this is what has brought me here. The driver must have got the wrong place. Tomorrow morning, when night disappeared, I would investigate the matter.

I pulled the cover over half my body and shut my eyes. The noise of soldiers going up and down the stairs. Whispering and singing getting louder and softer. I slept fitfully, and when the light of the sun came down on to my face, I was startled for the first few moments after waking, for I had been suffering a terrifying nightmare. A man was pushing me from a mountain peak to throw me to the bottom of a valley, while I screamed, but no one heard me. “Thank God, it’s the morning!”

The soldiers came down the stairs yet again. Their voices rang out without my being able to pick up a single word. I hurried to the window and opened it. I was shocked by what I saw. The window looked out over an enormous, unending cemetery. The graves had no gravestones. I rubbed my eyes so as not to be still dreaming.

I wasn’t dreaming. I don’t remember a cemetery that big. Could all these people have died in Baghdad alone during the last thirty years? That means that the Najaf cemetery – the biggest cemetery in the world – must also have got larger. Perhaps it had stretched as far as the streets and houses. My God! Where could I find the graves of my family? And what about my other relatives? Who could bear the burden of a woman who had come to die amongst them?

I went back to the square. It was the only thing that would enable me to get my bearings. Women were scattered in the corners, serving tea and sour cream while crowds of soldiers continued to throng around. Fast food carts, cigarette kiosks, children selling mastic, and dervishes carrying copied prayers and begging people to buy them. Faces, faces, faces. Pale and yellow, gaunt and dusty. Accents of every colour and kind.

I sat down beside an elderly woman. I drank some tea and asked for a sour cream sandwich. There was no time to question her. Her fingers worked astonishingly quickly, and the soldiers drank the tea in a hurry. A military lorry came out of entry number 4, and the soldiers swarmed round it. It filled up and carried them off. Where to? I don’t know. A second lorry, and a third . . .

When the woman had finished, I asked her: “What’s the name of this place?”

She answered me with another question: “Are you a stranger here?”

I hesitated, then replied: “Yes.”

“It’s the Revolution Bus Station,” she said.

I didn’t remember any bus station of this name, so I asked again: “Do you mean Revolution City?”

She looked at me in surprise, then said: “You are talking about a place that no longer exists.”

“How come?”

She turned round as if she was afraid of something, then said: “Since you are not from these parts, I’ll tell you a secret. I am from Revolution City. Or, to be more precise, I’m one of those who escaped the massacre.”

“What massacre?” I asked her, as terror gripped me.

She pursed her lips and began to pour tea for a passer-by. She remained silent until he had finished and gone. She put her head to my ear and said: “Hasn’t the world heard? That is an incredible pity. We lost our lives and died before we were dead.” She turned around again and whispered: “I was out of town when the ruler’s men surrounded it and dropped poison on it from planes. Everything was over in a few hours. You’re quite near now to the city that was . . . Today it’s just a cemetery stretching further than the eye can see.” She pointed with her hand: “It’s behind that hotel. Graves that do not bear the names of those inside them.”

She was silent again. Her furrowed face seemed even more sorrowful and her eyes were sunken. Then she looked at me and said: “It’s a lucky man who finds a grave with a name on for himself.”

“Why did they do that to you?” I asked. This time she did not turn round. “The poor are always firewood for the rulers – despite the fact that they come to power carried on their shoulders.”

The graves there are decorated. They are shaded by trees and surrounded by plants that flower with the change in the seasons, so that the cemeteries seem like lush gardens. Wouldn’t it be wise to find myself a place near a tree, beside my husband? With my friends that I had lived among for thirty years?

I had buried my husband between two trees whose branches were linked above, as if making an agreement to protect him. I enclosed the grave in a frame of flowers and engraved on his tombstone ‘We will meet in Heaven’. Contrary to the hopes that I had in that strange country, it seems that I have gone to hell.

A Political Love Story Teeming with the Sewage of a Soap Opera

Posted on July 24, 2019July 23, 2019 by Jennifer Baker

Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s debut novel, The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, provides a haunting dissection of contemporary Thai life and its inescapable repetitions. Throughout the novel’s 27 vignettes, the characters—two doomed sisters, an orphan turned aspiring singer, a jilted mother gone mad from mistrust, a father dying of lovesickness, a Marxist boyfriend turned right-wing politician, and a navel-gazing wannabe war reporter—find themselves drifting through the dizzying paradoxes of modern-day Bangkok and its lush environs. As they search for love, glory, or anything that might rescue them from the fog of their respective despairs, Nitiprapha delivers a sweeping indictment of a society continually finding itself constrained by a derivative cycle of warped logic and fantastical dreams.

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won Southeast Asia’s most prominent literary award and became a domestic sensation in Thailand, due in part to its reverie-like vignettes designed to mimic the breeziness of Thai soap operas. Now, four years after the former jewelry designer and fashion-mag editor won her first of two S.E.A. Write Awards—making her the first woman to accomplish such a feat—Nitiprapha’s novel is available in English for the first time with a translation by the Bangkok Post’s film critic and lifestyle editor Kong Rithdee, who skillfully retains the poetics and absurdist nature of the original Thai edition.

Nitiprapha and I spoke about the “sewage-like” storylines of soap operas, how the toxicity of politics can make old friends vaporize, and how The Blind Earthworm became a laboratory for trying to make sense of the unsettling world around us.

Tillman Miller: The scope of The Blind Earthworm feels both intimate and epic, as if it’s one of the “Great Thai Novels” readers will continually revisit. How did the idea for the novel materialize?

Veeraporn Nitiprapha: Thailand has been going through significant political conflict since 2006, with street protests, rallies, and even domestic armed conflict, but it wasn’t until May 2010 that the right-wing government finally decided to crack down on a Red-Shirt rally in the middle of Bangkok, causing at least 2,000 injuries and 94 deaths, mostly at the hands of military snipers. These were unarmed people being killed by their own government, and frankly I was trying to cope with it. What bothered me deeply was how calm and even satisfied people were when supporters of opposing political parties were being killed.

During the seven-day crackdown in May, when the government declared a state of emergency, I met with this guy who I considered to be a moral and kind lifelong friend—a man who gave offerings to temples and donated to the poor, who adopted and fed stray dogs and cats—and I sort of unintentionally murmured to him, “They are killing people, bro,” and he replied, “It’s needed.”

The novel became a laboratory for making sense of the world, because it seemed as though everything had in some way stopped making sense.

I don’t know how to explain this, but right there in front of my eyes, this guy essentially vaporized into nothingness, vanished, became nonexistent. What had driven a good-hearted guy to become so heartless and cold-blooded? No one in this world should be killed for their beliefs—or their religion, their sexual preference, their taste in food or music, not to mention something as nonsensical as politics. So what was happening to us? What was happening to a country that I thought was so modest and nice and gentle-souled? I needed to understand this. I was 44 and already prior to the conflict I had an idea of writing a novel to impress my bookworm son—even if, ultimately, I didn’t write this book to impress anyone—I wrote it in order to survive mentally and to better understand the world around me. The novel became a laboratory for making sense of the world because it seemed as though every story I had ever known, and everything I had ever seen or heard had in some way stopped making sense. And so I felt forced to start writing this book.

TM: How can the larger themes—namely blindness to the truth and how people are trapped by personal beliefs from which they can never escape—say something about polarization in other parts of the world, including the United States?

VN: There is a blindness to one’s own self rather than a blindness to the truth. You never know which version of yourself is your true self, not to mention the truth of someone else. You can only know who you were before you become a nationalist, a martyr, an environmentalist, or a person protesting Tibetan massacres. You can only know who you were before you started wearing your pairs of designer shoes, before you got your degree from Yale and started driving a Porsche, before you bought a sleek condo and found the love of your life, before you started listening to Brahms and Beethoven or reading Kant and Marx or believing in gods.

What is so frightening isn’t that you can’t escape from the person you’ve become, but that most people don’t want to escape. Life—even after all the “greatest things in life” have been experienced—is meaningless and boring and unsophisticated. I guess this blindness happens everywhere in the world and it happens to the youth, to people in their middle ages, to the rich, and to the poor. There is a universal need for us to become someone we need not be.

TM: Your descriptions of Bangkok in the novel include: a “loud, mad city,” a “city of broken dreams,” “a city he had never loved,” and a city constantly finding “itself cloaked in an impenetrable haze that prevent[s] it from knowing the truth of what had actually happened.” How important was it to write about Bangkok as a complicated, alienating city, specifically in contradiction to the Westernized image of Bangkok as a city of liberation and hedonistic fantasy?

VN: Bangkok is one of the great places any writer would love to use as a background—every scene in the city has thousands of unspeakable implications, especially when considering things like myths and illusions. I was born and raised here, and I’ve stayed in Bangkok all my life, so I know the city well, but like all big cities in the world, behind the Bangkokian façade of vivid lights and expensive, beautiful, modern buildings is a city hiding its ugliness and disgraces: the over-killed garbage, the crimes, the prostitutes, the drugs, the poorest of the poor—all kinds of inequalities. You must also consider the official name of Bangkok, which is Krung Thep and means the “City of Angels” or something like heaven—a higher virtue, a divine inhabitant. Then consider how the political massacre of May 2010 happened right there in the heart of heaven, and yet all of the “angels” in the city were so calm, so relieved, even happy to see thousands of strangers being shot and killed. It made me bitter. I was overcome with a deep, painful bitterness seeing the fashionable, well-educated, well-paid people of the city feeling content about the injuries inflicted upon the poorer, less educated people who were mostly from the upcountry. And it was important to write about that bitterness.

TM: Many observers have compared this novel to Thai soap operas, in particular to the show Club Friday. Was it your intention for the vignettes to be “attuned to the rhythm” of these shows? And how is the storytelling structure of the novel similar to the structure of Thai soap operas?

I wrote this book as a love story teeming with the sewage of soap opera.

VN: In Thai we have a word for “sewage” (น้ำเน่า or nam-nao) —although “sewage” may not be the exact translation—it means something like “the water that’s blocked in certain spaces,” such as a pool or a drain, where no new water is able to come in and there is no way for the old water to go out. So the stagnant water becomes rotten, black, and smelly. And often we use this word to describe soap operas because they have the same old toxic storylines that keep repeating themselves, which is also very similar to how the general public keeps becoming involved with politics in the streets of Thailand. People get involved with political movements the same way they get involved with watching their favorite soap operas: they become full of emotions, myths, illusions, impossibilities, tears, and melodramas. In first-world countries, it seems as though people consider what they will gain from a political party and its policies before supporting a party. Over here, throughout the years, we just keep talking about good-guy politicians and villainous politicians as if we’re electing high priests into parliament. For most people it’s like watching television or a movie. People take the sides of the characters they like and then they feel compelled to follow those characters into the street. That’s why I wrote this book as a love story teeming with the sewage of soap opera—but it is a hypothesis only.

TM: Your description of the stagnant water reminds me of the way you described the once-pastoral canal in Bangkok where you grew up. How did that setting influence the settings in the novel?

VN: I was a happy kid growing up on the bank of that canal. It was close to school and located away from the busy main streets. There were few people in the area and even fewer cars and it was never hectic, so in a lot of ways it felt very rural and upcountry—both in the small-town way of life and in the natural landscape. In that way, I used the novel’s river setting to reflect the simple, pure, modest, and kind-hearted Thais before the most recent political conflict.

TM: I enjoyed how the myth-like stories in one vignette could seemingly reveal themselves to be actual stories involving two characters in a future vignette. Was this transference of myth to everyday life a way of showing how—in the words of the novel—we’re “a civilization reduced to legends”?

VN: Perhaps I did mean for the vignettes to demonstrate how things are reflecting each other though, such as the love story and the political conflicts, and the twin stars, Chareeya and Pran, the meeting and parting again and again, the repeating story of soap-opera plots in different settings and vignettes, and then the repeating of political conflicts in different vignettes. I think I was also trying to say that politics in general should not be as big of a deal as they are today. In an ideal world we shouldn’t have to fight over politics.

Still, I did write a lot about the aimlessness, emptiness, meaninglessness, and loneliness of society. I think getting involved in politics is also driven by this lonely, modern life in the city. It’s usually the middle class in the city—mostly Bangkokians—that start the nationalist demonstrations to overthrow the elected government and, in the end, they support the military coup. But what could drive people to the point of being angry modern-day nationalists 80 years after the start of WWII? Perhaps they see themselves as becoming some sort of heroes, but really their nationalist views are so meaningless and powerless and aimless. Sorry, I don’t know what has happened to my country. That’s why I keep writing, because I still don’t know the answers.

I don’t know what has happened to my country. That’s why I keep writing, because I still don’t know the answers.

TM: You mention the nationalists seeing themselves as heroes. This reminds me of the character Natee and how he performs in front of the mirror, seeing himself as a Hollywood hero. This leads him to pathologically lie about being a war correspondent to impress women. On some level, could Natee be seen as an archetype of the nationalistic mindset in Thailand?

VN: Well, on a lighter level, Natee could represent people who pay too much for name-brand products, people who try so hard to get into Ivy League universities, people who patiently cope with bad bosses and colleagues in order to stay in the most well-known firms and be seen as the “normal people” of the world. And yes, Natee could represent nationalists, too. There are people in my country who protest against the elected government and support the coups to overthrow it when they could simply just vote to make their voices heard. Maybe they daydream of becoming martyrs who save the country from a monster politician or a bad immoral devil. Maybe that’s why some people can feel relieved when a hundred people are shot dead and several thousand people are injured. I really don’t know. I wish I knew, but I don’t and all I can do is write to save myself from losing faith in humanity.

These Middle-Grade Novels Are Some of the Most Formally Innovative Works of Our Time

Posted on July 24, 2019July 21, 2021 by Jess Zimmerman

When I took my copy of Lemony Snicket’s The Carnivorous Carnival up to the check-out line at Barnes and Noble, the cashier flipped through the book and paused.

She was sorry, she said, after a couple more puzzled page flips. There appeared to be a misprint. She called an employee in the kid’s section to bring me another copy of the book.

But almost immediately, the coworker called back—with the alarming news that all the copies had the same misprint. The bookseller became flustered. Was her colleague sure? Which page? The bookseller began reading it out loud.

“If you have ever experienced something that feels strangely familiar, as if the exact same thing has happened to you before,” Daniel Handler— or rather, Lemony Snicket— wrote, at the start of chapter five, “then you are experiencing what the French call ‘déja vu.’ Like most French expressions— ‘ennui,’ which is a fancy term for severe boredom, or ‘la petite mort,’ which describes a feeling that part of you has died— ‘déja vu’ refers to something that is usually not very pleasant, because it is curious to feel as if you have heard or seen something that you have heard or seen before.”

The page after that begins with, “If you have ever experienced something that feels strangely familiar, as if the exact same thing has happened to you before, then you are experiencing what the French call ‘déja vu.’”

I was thirteen and hadn’t known authors could use the form of a book itself to convey meaning.

Once she finished the line, the bookseller snorted. She got the joke, and I was privately delighted. I was thirteen and hadn’t known authors could do that—that they could use more than just the text, but the form of a book itself to convey meaning.

A Series of Unfortunate Events offers the kind of gloriously literate, intertextual experience that is a siren song to Nature’s Rare Book Librarians in their infancy. (Or at least to me— but my interest in rare books tends to be the weirdness of the object itself, and how the physical form of the book assisted in, or played with its function. Back when I worked at a rare books library, I used any excuse to send friends, colleagues, or Twitter followers pictures of a hunting manual bound in deerskin.) As objects, the books of A Series of Unfortunate Events seem primed to inculcate a love of the codex. Unlike say, the Goosebumps books, with their flimsy covers, they are substantial enough to bear up being shoved into backpacks, dropped onto asphalt, and loaned to friends, while still being a delight to look at and handle. The hard covers and ragged pages perfectly reflected my childish understanding of “old books” (one that, in my case, owed more to the Dear America book series than any interactions with actual old books). Each book ended with a letter, telegram, or other piece of ephemera from Lemony Snicket to his editors, hinting at the setting and plot of the next book in the series. For an added touch of verisimilitude, Snicket’s letters often list items, photographs, and other artifacts from the Baudelaires’ journeys, which he promises to send to illustrator Brett Helquist, so Helquist can study them for his quirky pencil drawings.

Helquist’s illustrations often creep into the text, or change it. In The Carnivorous Carnival, the book whose déja vu page caused such confusion, the unfortunate Baudelaire children nearly get thrown into a lion pit. These ferocious felines are menacing enough in the text, but Helquist adds another layer of danger that climbs right out of the page. His lions swipe at the text itself, ripping off the “Ch” of “Chapter Ten,” and causing the two letters to tumble down the bottom of the page, and towards the huge gouges another lion’s paw has made through “Caligari”— the name of titular carnival. It’s a moment of delightfully absurdist extratextuality, echoing the precipitous drop awaiting the Baudelaires, and making the threat to our heroes all the more inescapable.

The books play around with the knowledge that they are books, in a sort of Barthesian jouissance, exploring and exploding literary codes. They are writerly texts. By far the most ingenious moment of inter- and extratextuality comes in The Ersatz Elevator.

“We’ll take the elevator,” says the Baudelaire children’s terrible guardian du jour (or du livre) Esmé Squalor. And they do. Sort of. As Snickett narrates, Esmé “swept her arm forward and pushed the Baudelaire orphans into the darkness of the elevator shaft.”

And then…

An all-black two-page spread in *The Ersatz Elevator.* (Photo by Elyse Martin)

These two pages are, I believe, the cleverest cliffhanger in children’s literature. As with the illustrated lions tearing at the chapter titles, the events of the novel are too grand to be confined by the text block. They leap from text to paratext. It’s a delightful innovation within the codex space— and also an allusion to perhaps the novel most aware of being a novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

“Alas, poor YORICK!” exclaims the narrator of Tristram Shandy, two lines separate from the rest of the text block, when the character of Yorick dies. The next page is coated in black ink. The text itself is in mourning… quite literally.

The black page in *Tristram Shandy.* (Photo by Kat Sommers)

The black page, one of the most famous visuals from this precociously postmodern 18th-century novel (which also includes, in Volume III, an inserted sheet of marbled paper), plays with the reader’s expectations of what a codex ought to be and look like. It defies the expectation of continued text while, at the same time, revisiting historical print conventions. The mourning page, though unusual to a set of 21st-century eyes, is a literary tradition deeply rooted in the history of English printing. As Whitney Trettien writes in her blog post, “Tristram Shandy & the art of black mourning pages,” “mourning pages or all-black prints, sometimes with a coat of arms or other insignia etched out,” could be found “in printed funeral sermons and memorial verse” from the seventeenth century onward. It is a printing convention that calls attention to the book as object, sometimes even when the book itself has been digitized and put online. And, like Snicket’s déja vu page, Sterne’s contemporaries did not always understand the black page. Professor Whittney Trettien found this anecdote about the printing history of Tristram Shandy in William Coombe’s The Philosopher in Bristol (1775):

“The author of that celebrated work at the close of his matchless description of Yorick’s death, introduced a black or mourning page.— I cannot conceive, how it was possible for his design to be mistaken’ — but so it was:— and such whimsical and idle conjectures were made concerning it, — that he resolved, since the leaf of one dead color, with a moral meaning, was so little understood, to exercise the ingenuity of his readers inventions and try how they would receive a fanciful page of various colours, which was inserted in a succeeding volume without any meaning at all.”

The latter is in reference to the marbled page, which, in the text, Sterne refers to as “the motly emblem of my work,” and which the Sterne Trust interprets as “a visual confirmation that his work is endlessly variable, endlessly open to chance.” No two hand-marbled pages are exactly alike, creating a unique page and thus making visible the subjective experience of the reader, making it an active part of the text. (Sterne does this even more specifically with a blank page, where he asks his reader to imagine an illustration in the blank spot, “as like your mistress as you can—as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you— ‘tis all one to me— please but your own fancy in it.”)

For me, marbled paper conjures up images of endpapers, the papers fixed to the inside cover of a book to hide all the strings and glue keeping the cover and the paper block together. That wouldn’t be the first association for Sterne’s contemporary readers—the marbled endpaper is a characteristic of 19th rather than 18th-century volumes, and in fact Sterne relied on the very unfamiliarity of marbling to catch his readers’ attention. But the marbled page has taken on even more extratextual significance in the 250 years since it first appeared, now seeming to end the volume in the middle. Where does the story end, one wonders when encountering this misplaced endpaper, and where does it begin? Purely with the written word, or with the codex, the book-as-object itself?

What should we make of the fact that some of the most formally interesting books of the 20th and 21st centuries are meant for children?

Snicket posits the same question—but for children. What should we make of the fact that some of the most formally interesting books of the 20th and 21st centuries are meant for middle-grade readers? I personally think it’s a reflection of the modern notion that imagination, that playfulness, is for children, and that adults have more serious concerns. We adults, it is assumed, know what books are and how they should operate; our attention is supposed to be directed to the grim realities they contain. The interesting (and profitable) way of experimenting with the codex for adults is turning books into e-books. We still test the limitations of text blocks on pages, but it’s no longer a question of the physical object, but a question of translation: ink into pixels.

I also find it fascinating that Snicket, like Sterne, does not allow the reader to be a passive subject. Middle school is about the age when one discovers the first limits of one’s personal subjectivity, when one begins to understand the rich and variegated nature of human experience, and that there may not be one right answer to a situation. It’s the time you begin to question if what you read in books is true, when before the fact that the books were books gave them all necessary authority. By calling attention to the book as object, and pulling his young readers into the text, Snicket furthers that subjective development. The last book of A Series of Unfortunate Events ends not with a bang, nor a whimper, or even a line, but an illustration of a giant question mark floating in the sea. When you turn the page you see another illustration, possibly of the same sea, with a man rowing away.

Perhaps this is the fictional Snicket, leaving the reader to guess as to the real meaning, the real lesson of the series. After all, the reader has all they need to make a judgement. They have the books— and they have themselves.

Sexual Assault Survivors Don’t Owe Anyone Their Stories

Posted on July 23, 2019July 22, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

Part 1: fuck telling the truth

At some point in 2015, I began writing a story about rape that didn’t have a rape scene.

Instead of describing the abuse that the protagonist experiences, I wanted to write about the boring everyday weirdness of the trauma that comes from sexual violence. The dullness and the silliness. The text offers no rape scene because it offers no “proof.” It’s full of silence and things that happen offstage because at the very center of my story is the assumption that you believe the protagonist. I was not writing to convince skeptical people that sexual violence happens or that sexual violence is bad.

I was writing for survivors.

I was not writing to convince skeptical people that sexual violence happens or that sexual violence is bad. I was writing for survivors.

Two years later, in November 2017, I signed a book deal. The Harvey Weinstein story had just broken.

Towards the end of the long months while we were searching for a publisher, #metoo statuses started going up. There were so many true stories to read, so much graphic detail. A lot of testimony and a lot of convincing. I didn’t post anything. I didn’t read all of them.

I’d just written a whole novel about rape, so I was tired.

I’ve tried to write this essay several times. I’ve had a draft in my mind, and scattered across the notes app on my phone, for years. I was trying to put together a sort of theory of the case for why I hadn’t written explicit descriptions of sexual violence, and every time the #metoo discourse developed and unfolded I added to this hodgepodge collection of notes. I wrote a first draft in November last year after watching Christine Blasey Ford testify.

In her opening statement Blasey Ford said:

“My responsibility is to tell you the truth.”

And this:

“Sexual assault victims should be able to decide for themselves when and whether their private experience is made public.”

It struck me that Blasey Ford only said the name Brett Kavanaugh to her husband and her therapist in 2012. Thirty years after the assault happened, she needed to explain why she wanted a second, separate front door on their refurbished house.

Blasey Ford did not want to share the story of her sexual assault publicly. She originally came forward when Kavanaugh was included on the Republican shortlist, then sharing her information confidentially. She had hoped that would be enough and that she could remain anonymous.

Fuck telling the truth. Fuck telling the truth to people who already think you’re lying. Fuck having to read and relive that shit. Enough.

Public testimonies of traumatic and violent events serve an important function. They are appeals to perpetrators to stop, for justice within the courts (as far as this exists), for interpersonal and legislative protection, to be believed.

Fuck telling the truth to people who already think you’re lying. Fuck having to read and relive that shit.

And recently there have been so many: Lizzette Martinez, Drea Kelly, Kitty Jones, who came forward in Surviving R Kelly; Wade Robson and James Safechuck who came forward in Leaving Neverland, as well as the women I have already mentioned. I find it hard to express in words how I feel I when I watch them speaking. These survivors deserve every single good thing.

The question I ask myself is: how should we write for them? When they want to laugh, and show their teeth.

The answer I come to always, in some way, relates to joy. While I understand the strategic and personal importance that describing traumatic events can have, I see no joy there.

Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement, gave an interview on the subject of telling what she calls “trauma stories” in February 2018. Burke emphasizes joy as a part of the healing process:

“Sometimes we have to tell our stories to help other people and give them permission to tell theirs, right? Sometimes we have to tell our stories for ourselves, or in service of other people. But just having them available? That’s not the solution. Once a book is written about a bunch of trauma stories, what happens then? I really do believe that this movement should be focused on places where we can cultivate joy and love as a means to progress the healing process.”

The question she was answering was: “What’s your big idea that other people aren’t thinking about or wouldn’t agree with? Why is it so important?”

I watched another kind of testimony last year: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. Towards the end of the stand up set, Gadsby returns to an anecdote she has told as part of a joke earlier in the show. She reveals that, actually, the real-life ending of the anecdote in question was not funny. In real-life, the man in the anecdote verbally abused her and beat her up. After telling us this, she describes other violence she has experienced, including rape.

Gadsby tells us she is staging an intervention, invoking the imperative, “I must”: “I must quit comedy,” she says, in order to “tell my truth and put tension [back] in the room.”

If her aim was to stop making her audience laugh and make us cry instead, it worked. By the end of the Netflix special, I was bawling.

But I had, and have, reservations about the explanation Gadsby gives for her intervention.

What is the effect of describing or showing a trauma-inducing event (this thing we are calling truth) and then giving your audience permission — the cue — to cry before closing their laptops, moving on with their lives, next up Friends? I am not sure it does create tension. Crying, after all, is a form of relief. For those who don’t share her experience, I worry it offers proof positive that they have empathized and may resume their normal lives.

For many who share her experience, her disclosure has been cathartic, affirming. It is this that makes her invention important. If the experience was cathartic and affirming for Gadsby alone, that is enough. As Burke says— sometimes we have to tell our stories for ourselves, sometimes in service of others.

As Burke also says, what happens then?

I don’t believe there is an artistic imperative to swap laughter for crying.

Survivors, presumably, might sometimes like to hear jokes. I don’t believe there is an artistic imperative to swap laughter for crying. Or “quit comedy” for “truth.” Laughter is not the opposite of the truth.

When we laugh at a bad thing, that can be a big fuck you. An exercise in power and control. A claiming of irony and bawdiness. Of being unlikeable, unbelievable, unpalatable. Evidence that we survived.

There can be joy in surviving and healing in joy. Like when Gadsby talks about how much she likes the sound of the tea cup hitting the saucer. That bit I really liked.

The weight of testimony is heavy.

Over the course of 2018, a Brazilian spiritual healer known as João de Deus (“John of God”) was accused of sexually abusing over 500 people, including his own daughter.

On February 2, 2019, Sabrina Bittencourt, the woman who led the campaign against him, killed herself.

In 2016 Bittencourt began the hashtag #eusousobrevivente (“I am a survivor”) which went viral in Brazil. Bittencourt, who was from a Mormon family, spoke about her own experience having been sexually abused in her family’s church from the age of four.

After #eusousobrevivente, Bittencourt founded “Combate ao Abuso no Meio Espiritual,” an organization focussing on exposing sexual abuse by religious and spiritual leaders. In 2018 she helped expose João de Deus and Prem Baba, another Brazilian spiritual healer. Bittencourt began receiving death threats and, fearing for her life, she fled Brazil for Spain, where she died.

Can artists owe it to their audience to take the omission, the lying, out of the craft? To tell more truth? To give testimony, like Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill before her, like the people posting #metoo stories? Can anyone owe anyone that?

I don’t think so. Surely this should be a thing survivors do only if they want to, for themselves. It cannot be something an artist, or anyone, “must” do. Blasey Ford should have been allowed her secrecy, her privacy. As we know, visibility isn’t always safe. Sometimes it’s just not what a person wants.

Can artists owe it to their audience to take the omission, the lying, out of the craft? To tell more truth?

Plus, some people, maybe quite a lot of people, will still say that you are lying.

Meena Kandasamy has described her novel, When you hit me; Or the portrait of the author as a young wife, which was published in 2017, as informed by her own experience of an abusive marriage. She does not give the husband in the book a name, or the protagonist. Towards the end of the novel, she writes:

“Sometimes the shame is not in the beatings, the rapes. It is being asked to stand to judgement.”

Fuck being asked to stand to judgement. Fuck giving proof to the people who already think you’re lying. Fuck having to give proof of your pain, or your humanity. Fuck appealing politely, respectably, earnestly.

Part 2: in defense of masks

As an undergrad, I searched for books about dictatorship, colonialism. I knew from stuff my mum had said that this was the history of the Americas and Europe, although it was not what I was being taught. I loved a book by Edwidge Danticat called The Dew Breaker, a book in fragments about a sculptor whose parents are Haitian refugees in the United States. The middle chapters follow several different Haitian migrants to the U.S., most of whom never meet, who were tortured under the Duvalier regimes, perhaps by the same man. (And this man, we realize by the end of the book, may have been the sculptor’s father.)

I wrote about The Dew Breaker in my undergraduate thesis (for which I received an average mark: “The candidate writes about Latin American literature but neglects to mention magical realism”). I wrote in defense of tracing the spidery effects of trauma across generations, how it breathes in the mundane things (like where you put a door when refurbishing your home). I argued the case for bringing readers to an understanding of their own complicity, as Danticat does, without offering narrative relief or closure. Of not allowing them to tear up over a graphic scene—what an awful thing to have happened, there, then—and go on back to their lives.

In my thesis, I also wrote about another writer. I loved the way he showed how pain passes through generations until you lose count. How oppressive structures shapeshift and survive. How he kept Anglophone readers out by doing jokes in Spanish. I wrote him an email which said, “Why does the U.K. edition of Drown have a glossary? Also I am a massive fan and your books have changed my life.” I didn’t believe in glossaries, I told him; he responded quickly that neither did he. I was thrilled. Fuck glossaries!

I proudly shared this victory of mine with my family. I was offended by my cousin Pedro’s response: “Ha well, I’m sure Junot Díaz found your Facebook profile picture before replying.”

In his lauded New Yorker article, before disclosing experiences of child sexual abuse, Junot Díaz writes about a woman who approached him at a reading, asking about sexual violence in his books. He explains that, after years of angst, he is writing this article for her. He calls her “you”:

“I wish I had told you the truth then, but I was too scared in those days to say anything. Too scared, too committed to my mask. I responded with some evasive bullshit.”

There is a lot I overlooked in Junot Díaz for so long. (A lot.) But those two sentences pissed me off immediately. It isn’t bullshit to be evasive when someone asks you to disclose experience of sexual violence on the spot. And it is okay to be scared. There’s nothing cowardly in this evasion or “mask.”

My mother used to tell me stories of the student newspaper at her university in Brazil during the dictatorship. When they were censored, they used to fill the space of the censored stories with recipes, or leave them blank. It was a coded way of saying, we cannot say what really happened. But something happened. Believe us.

By the same token, many popular Brazilian love songs from that era are not about romance at all, but a covert way of expressing longing for political freedom and home.

After all, the plain truth—the possibility giving testimony safely—is not always available to survivors. Christine Blasey Ford has said she cannot go home. Neither can Sabrina Bittencourt.

This is something many of us know; it is why we deal in whispers.

Chico Buraque’s’s song Cotidiano, which he wrote in 1971, during the military dictatorship, when his music was heavily censored, starts like this:

Todo dia ela faz tudo sempre igual
[Every day she does everything the same]
Me sacode às seis horas da manhã
[wakes me up at six in the morning]
Me sorri um sorriso pontual
[smiles a punctual smile]
E me beija com a boca de hortelã
[And kisses me with her mint mouth]

Todo dia ela diz que é pra eu me cuidar
[Every day she says I must take care]
E essas coisas que diz toda mulher
[and these things that all women say]
Diz que está me esperando pro jantar
[says she’s waiting for me for dinner]
E me beija com a boca de café
[and kisses me with her coffee mouth]

Evasion, it seems to me, has always been a part of the craft. Díaz, always at pains to demonstrate his knowledge of our Latin American history, knows this very well.

On “truth,” Díaz wrote —

“We both could have used that truth, I’m thinking. It could have saved me (and maybe you) from so much.”

Within three weeks of publishing the article, Díaz had been accused of sexual assault. And more stories of misogyny came later, nearly all from black and Latina women. One magazine editor told the Washington Post, “Everyone in the literary world/the media knew this, or suspected it.”

Of course, Díaz’s testimony in the New Yorker was never about the woman in the bookshop.

Had the context of his disclosure been different, we might have speculated that Díaz wrote that article simply in service of his own healing, in which case the invocation of the woman in the bookshop would still have been self-aggrandizing and presumptuous, in particular his claim of “saving” her.

The plain truth—the possibility giving testimony safely—is not always available to survivors.

As it is, we might speculate that he made his disclosure in the hope of softening the blow of incoming accusations. In which case, the invocation of the woman in the bookshop is dehumanizing, as well as dishonest. Díaz isn’t writing for her; he’s using her as a prop.

As for the accompanying metaphor —that of the bad mask—it works to distract us by locating a pathology where there was none. His original evasion was not the problem. Díaz never owed the woman in the bookshop “the truth,” even if we believe that she is real.

In Díaz’s work, masks are often associated with physical deformation and ugliness, and used to symbolize violent repression—machismo covering up pain.

I see masks differently: a technology for survival, sometimes bound up with femininity. A full face of makeup, a deferential smile. Drag. A mask can be a performance, can be our craft; it can be full of joy, invisibility, abandon; a celebration as well as a holding back of information, a strategic deliberation.

In a world where masks keep us safe, where they help us heal, where they are the things that we have made for ourselves, there is nothing dishonest about a mask.

Part 3: in defense of fiction

I have had interesting encounters since the book came out in the U.K. earlier this year. Some reviewers have disclosed experiences of sexual violence to me in private, telling me that is why they related to the story. When they’ve asked me if the sexual violence in the novel is based on my own life I’ve declined to answer. Other reviewers, perhaps out of awkwardness, perhaps because the novel doesn’t contain graphic descriptions of rape, talk about the book as if it’s not about sexual violence at all.

Twice I have had my novel introduced as autobiographical during in person interviews, although nowhere do the promotional materials describe it in this way. Both times, while being recorded, I have corrected the interviewer. I have found it surprising that journalists do not understand what is at stake when they say that a book about sexual violence is autobiographical, when they present my fiction as my testimony.

Of course, I also google authors in the minutes after finishing their novels. I play the game of matching up dates, and hair color and cities of birth and figure out what I can, and more often than not it leaves me with more questions than I started with.

The reader doesn’t have a right to know, not really, not for sure, the secret ties between the story and the life of the author.

But that’s part of the deal with fiction, isn’t it? The reader doesn’t have a right to know, not really, not for sure, the location or quantity of the secret ties between the story in the fiction and the life of the author.

That’s the contract in fiction: the reader agrees to suspend their disbelief. The starting point is “you’re lying.” The starting point is also “I believe you.” This is what makes the writer of fiction free.

There is no jury, no trial, no evidence, no proof.

It is, in my opinion, the most wonderful mask.

We are so often surrounded by testimony and by trauma stories but fiction, Netflix comedy specials, New Yorker articles even, can be spaces of relief, where we don’t have to relive and reread. Whether they tell stories about sexual violence or not.

In an interview with the New York Times in October 2018, Tarana Burke said, “I want to teach people to not lean into their trauma. You can create the kind of joy in your life that allows you to lean into that instead.”

As a writer of fiction, I am interested in joy.

I want to write in defense of laughing at
In defense of irony
In defense of faking it
In defense of anonymity
In defense of not offering proof
In defense of not testifying
In defense of invisibility
In defense of secrets
In defense of masks
In defense of lying
In defense of fiction

In her book, The Promise of Happiness, feminist academic Sara Ahmed talks about, instead of happiness-as-goal, happenstance:

“When I think of what makes happiness ‘happy’ I think of moments. Moments of happiness create texture, shared impressions: a sense of lightness in possibility.”

I said I was writing for survivors. There’s no one way of doing this. And I don’t know if I am doing it right. For me, writing for survivors doesn’t mean saving or solving or going back in time. I know that healing isn’t a thing that can be done and dusted; it can’t be finished and shut and shelved like a book.

When I write I think about healing not as a destination, but as a joy that comes and goes and that is felt.

10 Books By African Women Rewriting History

Posted on July 23, 2019August 9, 2019 by Jennifer Baker

In recent years, I have been attracted to the work of writers creating communities. Whenever I think of novels I love, I think of the groups the stories revolve around. Sometimes, these books concern themselves with a single event that was momentous in the society’s history. A lot of the books we consider classics devote themselves to this task.

The foundation of the African novel was the African Writers’ Series. The AWS, which was almost exclusively male, concerned itself with the issues of colonization, post-colonization, and the place of the African in the world. In maintaining that focus, there were certain pitfalls it sank into, including the erasure of women.

“Writers of all kinds,” Bessie Head, one of the few women writers published by the AWS, said, “whether novelists, poets or dramatists, are mirrors of the times in which they live.” But what happens when, for the times before they lived, there were no reflections of their stories? What happens when the reflections that were available produced inaccurate, biased images, and new ones have to be constructed? In the past few years, there has been an explosion of African women writers engaging in this process of not only mirroring the times in which they lived, but also reimagining moments past with images that are more accurate than those that hitherto existed.

My observation of African women writers redefining society in literature led me to compile this list. These authors have largely moved beyond Bessie Head’s remit of merely mirroring society, and are, instead, not only producing reflections, but also explaining what it took to arrive at these presentations and what’s been missing.

Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Owuor’s debut novel is set against the backdrop of the disputed 2008 Kenyan presidential elections. The story starts when Odidi Oganda, an engineer, is killed on December 27th, 2007, the day of the election. The foreground of the story shows his family’s struggles with the trauma of his death; in the background, Kenya struggles with the violence that arises from the elections. Owuor’s novel also goes back to 1950s and 1960s Kenya, where colonialism, and Odidi’s father’s past as a gun-runner and cattle-rustler in Northern Kenya dominate the story. “Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili and Silence. But there was also memory,” Owuor writes. This line, more than any other, shows that while national traumas in Kenya are often not talked about, they are also remembered.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie’s second novel, named after the symbol of the ill-fated Biafran republic, places readers in Biafra in 1967. A steady retinue of Igbo authors have written about the Biafra war, the most prominent of whom are Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, and Christopher Okigbo, who was killed during the conflict. Adichie adds her name to this pantheon, presenting Biafra through the eyes of Ugwu, Odenigbo, Olanna, Richard Churchill, and Kainene, and mapping out how the declaration of war affects their lives. Before the war, Odenigbo hosts an intellectualist circle in his home at the University of Nsukka. When the war begins, however, the characters get dragged into a world of violence and famine. Also, that ending made us cry.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s only novel to date follows Effa Otcher—a girl sold by her father to a white man as a bride—and her half-sister, Esi, who is captured and enslaved some time in the 18th Century. The story is narrated by the families of these two women over seven generations. Important historical events that occur in the book include the development of cacao in Ghana, the Anglo-Asante wars, and slavery and segregation in America.

The Hundred Wells of Salaga by Ayesha Harruna Attah

Set in Salaga, a town in Northern Ghana, during pre-colonial times, The Hundred Wells of Salaga initiates conversation around both the Trans-Saharan slave trade and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The story revolves around two strong female characters: Aminah, a slave, and Wurche, the daughter of a powerful chief. Wurche’s family has acquired a lot of wealth, and slaves, through the slave trade, whereas Aminah’s family has been ripped apart by it. When Wurche’s family buys Aminah as a personal slave for the daughter, the two girls’ emphasized distinctions of language, religion, and class are even more defined.

Image result for maaza mengiste beneath the lion

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

Mengiste’s first novel is set in the last days of the reign of Haile Selassie, the King of Kings, the Conquering Lion of Judah. The story is told through three main characters: Hailu, a doctor, and his two sons, Dawit and Yonas. Some of the strongest sections of the books are the long vivid scenes like when Dawit collects dead bodies abandoned on the roadside for hyenas to eat. Or the 82-year-old emperor reflects on his loneliness with only his pet lions for company. While Mengiste chooses to name The Emperor, she provides only a pseudonym for Mengistu Haile Mariam, the man responsible for most of the violence post-Selassie. In lieu of his real name, she calls him Guddu, which is Amharic for “the extraordinary things he wrought” and a passing reference to Queen Guddit, who ushered in Ethiopia’s dark ages in AD960. Interestingly, The Shadow King, Mengiste’s next novel due in September, is also set in Ethiopia under Selassie, particularly the period around the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Serpell’s first novel, The Old Drift, published earlier this year, covers a lot of vistas, of which one of the most memorable is that of Edward Mukuka Nkoloso and the Zambian space program. One of the main characters, Matha, joins the Afronaut training program. Narrated in sections by a swarm of mosquitoes, the book moves across several generations, starting with the colonial explorer David Livingstone who is killed by malaria in the middle of his failed search for the source of the Nile. In The Old Drift, Zambia’s history includes colonialism, Zambian independence, the AIDS scourge, the Afronaut space program, and Kariba dam, before moving into the future, where government surveillance becomes the norm.

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

In 1754, Kintu Kidda, the patriarch of his family, sets out to the capital of the Baganda kingdom to pay homage to the new Kabaka. On the way Kintu inadvertently kills his own son, setting in motion the curse that will afflict his family for generations to come. The name Kintu in itself brings to mind the Baganda myth that Kintu was the first man, but in Makumbi’s hands he is just a man who was responsible for a family curse. In her NYRB review of the book, Serpell called Kintu “The Great Africanstein Novel,” and it’s not hard to see why. The novel brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s opus, A Hundred Years of Solitude in the way it narrates the history of this family across multiple generations.

House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

House of Stone follows Zamani, an orphan born in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s war for independence. In Swahili, the word zamani means “a long time ago”, and is commonly used as a formulaic opening for stories a la “hapo zamani za kale”—a long time ago. The events that occur range from those that happened hapo zamani za kale to more recent ones. In the course of the story, Tshuma revisits the violence of the war for independence, of colonial Rhodesia, Gukurahundi —the ethnic cleansing initiated by Robert Mugabe—and the decades of cover-ups that follow.

Image result for happiness a novel aminatta forna

Multiple titles by Aminatta Forna

All of Aminatta Forna’s five books re-imagine history. Her 2002 memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water is about her father, Mohammed Forna who was a Sierra Leonean politician and Sierra Leone’s finance minister who was declared an Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience, and hanged on trumped-up treason charges in 1975. Forna also has four novels: Ancestor Stones, set in a Sierra Leone-esque location, and is the story of four women, all members of the Kholifa family, all of whose mothers are married to the same man. The Memory of Love takes place in 2002 Freetown in the aftermath of the end of the Sierra Leone war. The novel questions if truth and reconciliation can take place in the immediate aftermath of a particularly violent and bloody war. The Hired Man illustrates ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. And Happiness, a story about Attila Asare, a psychiatrist who has worked in different war zones around the world (Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Iraq), who reminisces about these war zones.

Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah

Gappah’s new novel comes out in September and is a retelling of David Livingstone’s misguided attempt at locating the source of the Nile in present-day Zambia, (his story opens Serpell’s The Old Drift), his subsequent death from malaria, and the transportation of his body back to England from Zambia. This novel allows the attendants’ voices to pierce through a journey of understanding reverence and one’s own choices in life.

Rebecca Godfrey Investigates the Murder That Shook Her Hometown

Posted on July 23, 2019July 18, 2019 by Jo Lou

In 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk was found murdered in Victoria, British Columbia. The case shocked Canadians, especially when they learned how Virk had been violently bullied and beaten by a swarm of teenagers she was trying to befriend—two of whom were eventually convicted of her murder. After learning about the crime, Rebecca Godfrey, a New York City–based writer who grew up in Victoria, returned to her hometown to learn more about what happened there.

The resulting book, based on six years of research, became a best-seller, and Godfrey was lauded for her wide-ranging vision and novelistic approach to true crime reporting. Originally published in 2005, Under the Bridge has just been reissued with a foreword by Mary Gaitskill and an afterword by the author.

I spoke to Rebecca Godfrey about being a fiction writer working in the true crime genre.

Jenny Offill: How did you first hear about this story?

Rebecca Godfrey: I first heard about the murder of Reena Virk from an article in The New York Times. I was very surprised to read under the headline that the “grisly slaying” had happened in Victoria—the small town I grew up in, which is a very quiet, pastoral place. It’s very unusual to see Victoria mentioned in an American newspaper, and even more unusual for the mention to be in connection with a murder. It’s usually mentioned in articles about tourism or salmon.

At the time, I was finishing up my first novel, The Torn Skirt, which was about teenage girls who become involved in a crime in Victoria. My friends and family started calling me, saying, “Your novel has happened in real life.” I was curious about the case, and if there were parallels, who these girls were, if I knew anyone involved.

So I went back to Victoria, and started asking around. I went into the youth prison, talked to some teenagers at the courthouse. The teenagers were really intriguing to me, right away, because they weren’t “Trenchcoat Mafia” types; they were the popular kids. No one could understand how they ended up involved in a murder.

JO: Were you at all hesitant to move from fiction to non-fiction?

RG: I was so compelled by the case that I didn’t think too much about it. I just wanted to learn more about these kids and what had happened, and to do so, I needed a press pass. I got an assignment from a women’s magazine so I could cover it. I was very naive; I didn’t realize how difficult it would be. I don’t think I would have done it if I’d known how frightening and tangled it would be.

On the other hand, I found a lot of freedom in telling a story I didn’t have to invent. I never hit that wall that you do with fiction: What should happen next? This story was so dramatic, with a natural narrative momentum provided by the real life events. And it had so much suspense, which as a novelist, I was grateful for. Who will confess? Will they get away with it? Underneath that, there were more significant questions I could explore. The central one was: How does the death of a girl change the lives of others?

JO: Did you have any preconceptions about the true crime genre before your reporting began? What were the clichés you wanted to avoid?

RG: I wasn’t very interested in true crime. I associated it with those paperbacks with ripped wedding portraits dripping with red blood on the cover. I was more influenced by Crime and Punishment and In Cold Blood—works that looked closely at the consequences and character of a crime. In the book, I don’t directly depict the murder; I didn’t want to put the reader in the position of a voyeur watching a girl be killed. Structurally, I tried to give the act of killing a different weight, so it reverberates and haunts but it’s not there for entertainment.

JO: Do you think being a novelist as well as a reporter shaped the information you were looking for?

No one could understand how the popular kids ended up involved in a murder.

RG: Yes, definitely. I researched things like the weather on the evening of the murder, the items found in search warrants, the autopsy details. But I wanted to have a lot of other information that most journalists wouldn’t likely include. What did the curtains in a girl’s bedroom look like? What music was the police officer listening to? What was a mother thinking when the police arrested her daughter for murder? I had to kind of push myself and my sources to get details that were evocative or contained an emotion.

JO: What moment surprised you most during the interviews?

RG: I was surprised when the facade of the teenagers broke down. They all hid behind this attitude and defiance, using gangster or hip-hop lingo, acting very cool. This really pissed off the detectives and reporters, who would say, “They don’t get it at all. A girl is dead!” But when I spoke to them, after a while, they would reveal their grief or shame or regret. I think they constructed indifference publicly as a form of armor. But in truth, they were horrified and haunted by the fact that Reena Virk had died because of something they did or didn’t do one evening.

JO: Reena Virk was the daughter of South Asian immigrants. The girl convicted of her murder was white as were many of the other teenagers involved in the beating. How did race and gender seem to intersect in these stories?

RG: Most people assume it was a case of seven white kids bullying and killing a girl of color. In fact, only three of the girls involved were white. This particular group of teenagers had a pretty sophisticated, modern racial dynamic. In my own reporting, I spent time with the teenagers involved and their friends and found them to be a very diverse group and I didn’t discover anything to establish racism as motive. Reena was certainly an “other” in this group – but that had more to do with beauty, religion (her parents were Jehovah’s Witness) and her gentle, fairly naïve character.

Racism was absolutely present in the justice system. The killer was given all kinds of breaks and sympathy because she looked like a nice, white girl from a “good” family. If Reena had been accused of the murder of a white girl, I don’t think she would have been given the same assumption of innocence. And the girls of color who were charged with assault were treated terribly on the stand; it was implied that one of them was the “real” killer — I assume lawyers thought that might stick with the jury because she was dark-skinned, tough-looking, and had been in foster care.

It was interesting the way the case was written about by academics—they were very critical of the media’s erasure of race. But most of the academics didn’t actually speak to the kids involved. I don’t know if you can apply theory to these teenagers who defied every stereotype. There was a blonde, pretty girl who wanted to be a gangster and had a group of minions shoplift for her. There was an Egyptian girl who was a kickboxer but stopped the initial attack on Reena. There was a trailer park kid whose mother concealed from him that he was part Metis. There was a soft-spoken, dark-skinned girl who was raised like a Dickens character, unwanted, moving from home to home. She turned out to be the most genuinely remorseful of all the girls.

JO: Since this book was published, there’s been an explosion of interest in true crime stories as seen in shows like Making a Murderer and the podcast Serial. But you were ahead of the curve in telling the story of a brutal murder in a nuanced and emotionally complex way. What do you think makes for a good true crime narrative?

How does the death of a girl change the lives of others?

RG: I have been really impressed with shows like The Wire, which isn’t true crime, but is based on real people and a historical moment, or the FX series about OJ Simpson. People are compelled by violence and crime—it’s almost primal—but it’s so easy to exploit that interest and just be prurient. So I think anytime the camera swoops and swivels around, when you get a wider perspective, our natural interest can be challenged in a meaningful way.

A lot of these more recent “prestige” shows are really quite radical in how they offer a dissection of social mores and values. Criminals aren’t presented as aberrant; we can see the forces acting on them. I think anytime you bring the scope of art to a crime story, you can bring offer some insight and meaning. Instead of just: “On July 11, Julie Jones head was bashed in.” But unfortunately, a lot of these true crime narratives still only feature women as the “dead girl.” Readers have really enjoyed learning about the real life women, prosecutor, the cop, the judge, the coroner, in Under the Bridge. They’re all really fascinating characters, more so because they exist.

JO: What are you working on now?

RG: I’m working on a novel called The Dilettante. It’s about the early life of Peggy Guggenheim, before she was a well-known collector, when she was starting her first gallery and trying to get out from under her family’s shadow and tragedies. It’s similar to Under the Bridge, in that it’s a novelistic rendering of very dramatic real events and characters.

I’ve tried to establish and discover the facts from searching out the unknown—talking to people who knew Peggy, finding unpublished manuscripts and letters, going through some pretty obscure archives. I don’t want to rely on or add to the very misogynist, inaccurate portrait of her that’s been created by a lot of male art critics and films like Pollock, where she’s so often dismissed as this sex-crazed, eccentric, silly socialite.

When she was in her thirties, she was involved in this moment where women really engaged in modernism. She lived in a manor called Hayford Hall on the moors in London with Djuna Barnes and another writer named Emily Coleman. They called it “Hangover Hall” and it’s where Djuna Barnes wrote Nightwood.

Peggy was sort of a Zelig character; she was always intertwined with these pivotal moments of history —from the Gilded Age to anarchism to modern art. The more I learned about her, the more I really fell in love with her, especially reading her letters which are so vulnerable and intelligent. She was an American trailblazer, wholly underestimated and mistreated, but very daring and reckless and enchanting. There’s been a lot of historical novels about you know, “Mozart’s Wife” or “Abraham Lincoln’s Daughter”—those stories are great and important, but I also think we need more epic, adventure stories about strange and powerful women.

Netflix’s “Tales of the City” Confronts the Queer Community’s Generational Divide

Posted on July 22, 2019January 16, 2024 by Jess Zimmerman

You can’t expect something called Tales of the City to be just one person’s story. For readers of Armistead Maupin’s weekly San Francisco Chronicle column, which became the book of the same name, that plurality was the heart of the charm: Maupin’s fictional housing complex on Barbary Lane, inhabited by a panoply of characters, seemed to be the city in miniature. The young naive Mary Ann Singleton was our guide in, but readers soon fell in love with her landlady Anna Madrigal, as well as dashing young gay man Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, straight lothario Brian Hawkins, and bisexual Mona Ramsey. Groundbreaking for their Dickensian take on life in San Francisco in the 1970s, Maupin’s columns—and the novels they subsequently became—have become an invaluable time capsule. But with its TV adaptations and particularly this latest Netflix limited series, Tales of the City has become something rarer: not just a portrait of a community but an intergenerational family album.

With the character of Anna Madrigal (played by Olympia Dukakis in four miniseries over the last 25 years), Maupin had always embedded a motherly figure in the world of Barbary Lane. As an older woman who took care of her tenants and who helped steer them in the right direction when needed, she was the center of the “logical” (as opposed to biological) family that Maupin sketched out for his readers. In this sense, Tales of the City was already looking to emulate a genre that until then had been largely heteronormative: the family epic.

Tales of the City looked to emulate a genre that until then had been largely heteronormative: the family epic.

Within queer circles, then and now, that remains unexplored territory. If coming out narratives, romantic tales, and later AIDS stories offered LGBTQ readers a window into their own community, they did so by looking squarely at the individual, the couple, and a budding young generation respectively. There was little in books by the likes of Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Larry Kramer, and Andrew Holleran that aimed to speak across generations or that portrayed the way gay culture was passed down from one to the next in bookstores, at bars, in meetings, and at rallies. As Chicano writer John Rechy has noted, the “homosexual” is the one minority individual who’s not born into the same minority community, and thus needs to seek out education and likeminded people. Issues of lineage and legacy—so central to ideas of belonging—have long needed to be retraced and reframed by queer men and women who, for most of the 20th century, saw any ties to a past or future severed once they left their own family narratives.

Maupin’s talk of a “logical family” was one way in which his work tried to wrestle with what it meant to write a narrative for oneself that didn’t completely do away with the comfort of a family unit. Anna wasn’t merely a surrogate mother to many in Barbary Lane; she was also the keeper of a story that had started long before her tenants had arrived and which, presumably, would continue even after they’ve left. That sense of continuance is precisely what opens the latest on-screen adaptation of Maupin’s characters: Mary Ann (Laura Linney) returns to San Francisco and Barbary Lane after decades away to find it housing a new generation of queer individuals—including her daughter, Shawna (Ellen Page), whom she’s been estranged from ever since she left Brian (Paul Gross) behind all those years ago to pursue a career in broadcasting. If, structurally, the family epic reminds us that the lessons of the past endure in the present and will echo in the future, Tales of the City has always stressed the way such a process is much more fraught within the queer community.

This latest Netflix revival, wherein Linney and Dukakis reprise their roles from earlier Tales of the City miniseries, puts front and center the issue of what older generations can teach those coming up and coming out in a presumably more open world, while also suggesting that there’s plenty that Gen Z and Millennials can in turn teach those who came before them. Attempting to reconnect with Shawna, Mary Ann goes out of her way to meet her daughter at the feminist co-op bar where she bartends. There, she’s presented with a radical new feminist world that would have felt unimaginable to her when she first moved to San Francisco in the 1970s (the very incident that kicked off Maupin’s original Tales column). Upon seeing a young woman do a burlesque number, Mary Ann admits that she doesn’t get how that’s feminist, at least by the standards of her day. “My generation,” she explains, “was trying to liberate women from objectification. Not, you know, encourage it.” She then gets a quick lesson in 21st century queer feminism, learning that wresting female nudity from the male gaze and owning it does, in a way, speak to the large leaps female empowerment has undergone in the last few decades. Despite the potential for combative optics (it’s not lost on anyone that an older white woman is attempting to question a young woman of color’s feminism), Tales models instead a generative and generous intergenerational conversation between these women, who better understand one another once they sit down to discuss their own biopolitical sensibilities.

In stark contrast—and in that very same episode—Tales stages a much more explosive conversation between an older generation of (white) gay men and a young (black) gay man that is as enlightening as it is uncomfortable to watch. Michael (Looking’s Murray Bartlett, stepping into the iconic role for this 2019 iteration) and his much younger boyfriend, Ben (Charlie Barnett) are at a dinner party thrown by Michael’s ex. That alone puts Ben on the defensive, finding himself to be a minority in terms of age, race, and—to judge by the decor and dinner party conversation about sojourns to Peru (“Can you believe this one hasn’t been to Peru?” one asks, incredulously)—income as well. Talk of those trips down south quickly make Ben very uncomfortable: “The best thing about Machu Picchu? The Sherpas!” one shares, only for the rest of the crowd to join to say that ogling their beautiful legs and calves is arguably the best part about visiting such a landmark. But it’s only when the word “tranny” begins to be thrown around (amidst an anecdote about a “sketchy part of Mexico City”) that Ben chimes in, innocently pointing out that people don’t use that word anymore, especially not in the context of playfully offending one another. What follows is a hard-to-watch scene wherein Ben’s “woke” politics are at once dismissed and mocked: “I don’t appreciate that we have to be policed,” one attendee bemoans, “at a fucking dinner party,” another adds. Here, then, is a moment when the progressive viewpoints of a younger character of color are pitted against a group of gay white men who feel those notions to be almost comically naive. Self-serving, even.

This scene tries to show just how difficult it can be to speak across the various schisms that divide the gay male community.

This tense dinner party scene initially looks to be an indictment of the other guests, with Ben as the lone voice of dissent. But with a cast that includes Stephen Spinella (the original Prior Walter in Tony Kushner’s landmark Angels in America), playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac, recent Tony nominee Brooks Ashmanskas, Mad Men star Bryan Batt, and other gay actors who’ve been out for decades like Malcolm Gets and Dan Butler, this Tales sequence is doing something much rarer. It’s trying instead to show just how difficult it can be to speak across the various schisms that divide the gay male community. “Why is your generation obsessed with labels?” Ben’s asked. “Because,” he answers, “what you call someone is important. It’s about dignity. It’s about visibility.” To a keyed-in 2019 audience, the line rings true and merely reinforces how out of touch these privileged older men are. But it’s not presented as the punchline of the scene, with Ben scoring points off the rich out-of-touch dinner guests. Instead, that accusation of privilege helps pivot the conversation into murkier territory. Spinella’s character, delivering a kind of monologue that’s bound to become as iconic as any he delivered on stage, hijacks the conversation to talk about how little Ben and his generation know about what he and other went through when they were his age. “When I was 28 I wasn’t going to fucking dinner parties,” he hisses in between gritted teeth. “I was going to funerals.” The world Ben is living with, he rails, “with you safe spaces and intersectionalities,” was built by those sitting around that dinner table. “So if a bunch of queens want to sit around a table and use the word tranny…” he trails off, before capping off his argument with as blunt a line as he can muster: “I will not be told off by someone who wasn’t fucking there.”

What’s thrilling (and unsettling) about this jaw-dropping exchange is the way it captures real-life sentiments from both sides of the generational divide. Ben protests that he knows what losing friends during the AIDS epidemic must have felt like, but his opponents are unmoved. In a way, invoking HIV/AIDS and the way it cleaved gay history in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s feels almost too cruel. It leaves Ben no chance to speak up or further make his case. But it also gets at the way any kind of historical continuance from the world of weekly funerals to PrEP-enabled safe sex practices can end up feeling like a political minefield. By the time Ben, utterly humiliated, lashes out at his boyfriend for not standing up for him, you almost get the sense that there might not be a way to easily suture these separate if complementary histories together. When a white gay man unironically tells a young black man that he knows nothing about living in a society that doesn’t care if you live or die, the chances of being able to have any kind of productive conversations within such separate parts of the community feel all but hopeless. Whereas Mary Ann opens herself up to learn about what new kinds of feminisms have made further inroads, that dinner party scene merely depicts the way some ruptures within gay culture that may well feel generational are in fact much more deep-seated and therefore harder to smooth over.

Despite its rainbow-hued marketing and its depiction of a vibrant young queer community, this newer Tales is intent on exploring what it means to tell LGBTQ stories that not only span generations but that speak across them. Ben and Michael’s friends may not come to an understanding—if anything both sides end up leaving much more convinced of their own righteous perspective. But the “fucking gay version of Get Out,” as Ben puts it, is enlightening to audiences watching. It’s a bold reminder of how siloed various segments of the LGBTQ community remain, yes. But also of how important it is to critically assess how history is passed down—and, more importantly, by and for whom. In bringing Maupin’s characters back and forcing them to reckon with the kinds of histories it helped tell and the ones it still needs to acknowledge, this new revival breaks ground in imagining what a truly diverse and intersectional version of gay history can look like.