Nordic Noir is a Reflection of Modern Europe

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Nordic crime fiction is a global phenomenon. Tonight, in London, New York, Mumbai, Tokyo, Lagos, Melbourne and Buenos Aires, readers by the thousands will be cracking open books populated by hardened Danish detectives, Swedish hacker-vigilantes and serial killers in Oslo. (Those who prefer their Nordic noir on TV will have more than a few options to choose from, too — The Bridge and The Killing, to name only the most famous.)

When we found out that two of the tradition’s notable and internationally acclaimed authors— Emelie Schepp, author of Vita spår (White Tracks); and Joakim Zander, author of The Swimmer — were corresponding in anticipation of the US release of Schepp’s latest novel, Marked for Life, we were intrigued, to say the least, and eager to share their conversation.

Schepp and Zander talked about what it means to be part of the literary legacy of Sjöwall, Mankell, and Larsson, about their writing influences, and about how they weave issues of immigration, refugees, ISIS, poverty and radicalization into the contemporary nordic landscape.

Joakim Zander: One of the questions I get the most when talking about my books abroad is: “Why is Nordic crime fiction so concerned with societal themes and criticisms?” I think there might be a number of reasons for this; the first relating to the tradition started in the 1970s by the “godparents” of Nordic crime, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who began to publish their books at a kind of breaking point in Swedish 20th century history. Since the beginning of the century there had been a steady increase in economic and societal growth, but the ‘70s meant marked stagnation and societal unrest. It was natural, I think, for crime writers to be drawn to the darker and more overarching themes of those times. This tradition was then carried on by writers like Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund and, to some degree, Stieg Larsson, as Swedish society continued to experience fundamental changes brought on by increased growth, urbanisation and immigration. I think we can perhaps return to the issue of immigration a bit later, but I am curious to hear your thoughts on this, Emelie. Do you feel that your books fit into this tradition of Swedish crime? And if so, why is this the case? Why is this important to you?

Emelie Schepp: As with many other crime writers, my books are a mirror of the world and society I live in. Swedish crime fiction often explores very dark themes and is often greatly concerned with social issues and the problems of living here.

…it can be quite shocking to learn about Sweden as the paradise lost…

Readers obviously feel a fascination for what we might call ‘Nordic melancholy,’ concocted from winter darkness, cold weather, and isolated landscapes. And I do think that my books fit into this tradition. I am aware that readers in other countries have a romantic idea of Sweden as one of the best places to live. It really is a great place to live, but I think it can be quite shocking to learn about Sweden as the paradise lost, and a society where violence, corruption, and murder actually exist. Behind our locked doors anything can happen. My motivation as a writer is to give my view of those who turn to crime, why they do so and what motivates them. I do believe that we are formed by the society we are brought up in. And how about you, Joakim, how do you approach these issues? I am especially curious since your books are perhaps not classic ”nordic noir,” but more international thrillers.

Zander: My whole writing process is quite theme-oriented, and usually I begin with issues that I have been thinking about for a long time. With my first book, The Swimmer, I had been thinking a lot about the war on terror and the West’s complicated and contradictory relationship to the Middle East, and I decided to try to construct part of the narrative to illustrate my view on this. With my second book, The Believer, I had been thinking a lot about how Swedish and other European societies are changing as a consequence of immigration over the last decades, and particularly at the moment with the Syrian refugee crisis. Although the causes that force people to flee their home countries are horrific, I think that the current immigration to Europe is an overwhelmingly positive thing for our societies. It forces us to rethink our old ways, to change and to adapt our societies, something that only makes us stronger. However, the large number of refugees that arrive in a very short time span also pose great challenges. Integration takes time and is often a painful process, especially when the people arriving are often very poor and do not speak the language of the destination country. An unfortunate consequence of this is that some parts of our societies become isolated and excluded from the mainstream. In my view this is a transitory phase, but the problems in these areas are real and tangible.

…some parts of our societies become isolated and excluded from the mainstream…

In my writing I am interested in trying to understand and illustrate where society is at the moment, and right now I think these are the issues define us, so for me it is impossible not to write about it. How about you, Emelie? What are your views on the current refugee situation and is it something that you consider in your writing?

Schepp: In Marked for Life, I wanted to write about a woman who should be odd. But I did not know how odd she was about to be until I read an article about child soldiers. In 2012 there was a huge debate about child soldiers after the movie “Kony 2012” had been shown on Swedish television. The movie is about Joseph R. Kony who is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a guerilla group that formerly operated in Uganda. He has been accused by government entities of ordering the abduction of children to become child soldiers. Over 66,000 children became soldiers. As I read the article I remember that I started questioning myself: “What would happen if there were child soldiers in Sweden? And what happens if the solider want to be a child again? Is it even possible?” And where in Sweden could I find children? I know it sounds very strange, but I had to find children that no one would miss, nor search for. To abduct a child in a playground often leads to quite a storm in media and I did not want that. I wanted the abduction to take place in secret, without anyone knowing.

One evening as I watched the news on TV, I saw a truck with a container that had overturned on a highway. And when the police arrived at the scene they found several refugees in the container. They had not been registered at the border. They were illegal. No one knew they were in Sweden. So I went down to the port of Norrköping and looked around. When I saw all the thousands of containers I realized that anything could be hiding in them, including children.

As I began writing Marked for Life I wanted to tell a story of how children can be shaped into something they were not born to become. Children are incredibly loyal, particularly to the hand that feeds them and I understood that such loyalty can be lifelong. I tell a story about immigrant children that are smuggled into Sweden and disappear without a trace. The sad thing is, this actually happens in Sweden today. Because of the large flow of immigration, smuggling and human trafficking are increasing. Desperate people who have decided to flee and have put their lives’ savings toward succeeding won’t be stopped. They have nothing to lose and nothing to return to. They want to achieve their dream of a better future. They will do everything to reach it. Travel down roads that do not exist. On water, through fences, past walls. They risk their lives. Many never make it; they die on the road. Adults and children disappear, are kidnapped, are taken away and are forced into a life of prostitution or slavery. Human traffickers profit from people in peril. And people in peril will do whatever they can to reach their dream. Their motivation is far stronger than that of those who try to stop them. In my second book, Marked for Revenge, I write about the young woman Pim who, in her dream of a better life, agrees to smuggle drugs. In both Marked for Life and Marked for Revenge I write about young people who are forced into different destinies.

And people in peril will do whatever they can to reach their dream.

But you, Joakim, in your second book, The Believer, you write about a young man who choses to join ISIS, although he is in control of his own destiny. Why do you think people in Europe would consider joining such a brutal organization?

Zander: I decided to write a book that partially dealt with the radicalisation of a young Swedish Muslim because, like everybody else, I was horrified by the war in Syria, the quick rise of ISIS, and the reports of young Europeans deciding to join a medieval, brutal form of Islam. In particular I was interested in the mechanisms that make a person prefer such a primitive and violent life to the relative order of Western life. When I started doing research on this topic, ISIS was still in ascendance and not much had been written about the young men (they are predominantly male) who had left for Syria and Iraq. There were very few first hand accounts of the process involved and what they had experienced when they arrived, because many of those in the first wave of jihadists were sent relatively untrained to the battle fields and most of them died there. But I got in touch with Professor Leif Stenberg at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Lund in Sweden and he was extremely helpful to me, taking time to discuss the theology behind radicalisation and sharing case studies.

As I studied the topic more closely, the character that became Fadi in the book came to me. There are many factors that appear motivating for people who eventually become radicalised, but in Fadi I tried to create a kind of composite; a typical case or character. And the typical person is a young man who grows up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood. Often he would have a history of petty crimes and violence before radical Islam made him see the flaws in his old ways.

Almost always the story of radicalization appears to be a story about exclusion.

Almost always the story of radicalization appears to be a story about exclusion. Although there are exceptions, the people who are susceptible are usually not part of what could be considered mainstream society, and do not find that they are welcome there. Radicalization becomes an act of defiance and of solidarity with other Muslims that are oppressed around the globe. It was important to me that Fadi became real to the reader, that his motives were crystal clear. I want the reader to sympathise with and understand Fadi, despite his extremely poor choices.

One final question for you, Emelie: As you are continuing your series about Jana Berzelius, do you think that societal themes, like the current refugee situation, will continue to influence your writing, and if that is the case, how?

Schepp: I have just released my third book in the Jana Berzelius-series in Sweden and I have plans to write several more books about her. My ambition is that my books should reflect Swedish society but that doesn’t mean that I focus on a specific problem. Society can also be mirrored through a character. Our personalities are shaped in a complicated interplay between heritage and environment and it is these factors that I am curious of and want to try to understand. Therefore it is not possible to shut the world out; we are shaped by it and are a part of it. This is how it always will be. Also for the characters in my books.

Dan Brown Is Paying to Digitize a Mysticism Library

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Mysticism and ancient texts play a prominent role in Dan Brown’s fiction, often prompting the Dr. House-esque epiphany that begets the novel’s triumphant conclusion. Many of these references, of course, were borrowed from reality. For the author Dan Brown, the Ritman Library (also known as the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica) in Amsterdam consistently provided mystical information he’d use in his novels, particularly for ancient-codes-breaking-protagonist, Robert Langdon. According to The Guardian, Brown has now committed to reciprocating the collection’s aid, in the form of 300,000 euros (~340,000 dollars).

The large donation by the bestselling author is primarily aimed at helping speed up and complete the library’s ongoing digitization project. Brown announced news of the donation in a two-minute Youtube video on The Ritman Library’s channel. Emerging from behind a rotating bookcase in his own personal library, the author lavished praise on the Dutch collection and its endeavor to expand its readership via digitization. “I consider it a great honor,” he said, “to play a role in this important preservation initiative that will make these texts available to the public.”

In addition to Brown’s donation, the Library has reported receiving nearly 17,000 dollars from the Dutch Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds — a foundation originally established in 1940 as an effort to rebuild the then-war-torn cultural life in the Netherlands.

Ritman Library Interior

The Library’s collection includes, among others: Hermetica, alchemy, mysticism, Rosicrucians and Kabbala. The near-25,000 works are split into two main categories with ~4,600 manuscripts and printed books from before 1900, and the rest being printed after the turn of the century.

Brown’s donation is certainly a noble financial decision, and it is a glimmering example of democratizing the accessibility of a rare resource. It does make you wonder though, just how many Da Vinci Code sister texts may emerge? Or if he too will digitize his own personal library and, more importantly, donate his rotating bookcase (to me)? Important questions to be considered, no doubt.

11 Novels That Take Place Over One Summer

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It wasn’t until I moved to the West Coast that I realized how much I relied on seasons to mark the passage of time. Without dropping leaves or sultry nights, time simply moved on. I’d be surprised to learn that only two weeks had passed since an event that felt like ages ago, or that it had already been three months since a memory that felt and looked like yesterday. I’m back East, where New Yorkers are notably obsessed with framing their anecdotes with seasonal references; if there was a beautiful spring or a bad winter, they mention it. We moved downtown last winter. The streets were a mess! It makes sense; seasons are natural tools for story-tellers. Like an original Oulipo device, they force a beginning and an end, serving as handy yardsticks for character growth. Plus, as any high school English class can tell you, seasons come with a ton of metaphors.

Every season seems primed for a certain type of story: winter’s tales of hardship, spring’s sexual awakening. But summer — longed-for, crazy summer — is when things get interesting. Children and students are cut loose, primed for trouble and the kind of learning that only happens outside the classroom. Adults are allowed to act on impulse because everyone’s gone crazy in the heatwave! Even lazy summer days lead somewhere unexpected: think of the Divers picnicking on the French Riviera before a duel breaks out or Tom Riply sipping a Negroni while planning a murder.

Here, then, are eleven books that take place over the course of a single summer.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon began writing this novel when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, so it’s no surprise that the book is informed by summer as experienced by a student, or what I think of as Summer with a capital S. This Summer is the ultimate freedom. The midway point between a job done and a fresh start, it allows for total, guilt-free self-indulgence (or at least it did in the era before internships). Art Bechstein, Chabon’s protagonist, does what many do in Summer, he goes looking for an adventure, which is exactly what he gets as he spins around Pittsburgh with the unlikely duo of “fancy” Arthur Lecomte and book-loving biker Cleveland Arning.

Skios by Michael Frayn

This comic novel is set on the fictional Greek island of Skios during the summer conference of the Fred Toppler Foundation, a dubious organization that promotes “civilized values.” The central conceit — a zany mix-up of identity and luggage — is unbelievable in the age of Google, but it’s pulled off by Frayn, the master of farce.

The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell

This Booker Prize-winning novel is one of J.G Farrell’s “Empire Trilogy” in which he explores the decline of the British Empire. The Siege of Krishnapur presents a fictionalized version of the real siege of Cawnpore that occurred during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. As the summer unfolds and the siege by the native sepoys presses on, the situation of the British residents of Krishnapur steadily deteriorates.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Dandelion Wine is a series of linked short stories that follow twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding during one summer in Green Town, a fictionalized version of Bradbury’s hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. Douglas describes the dandelion wine that his grandfather makes as “summer on the tongue…summer caught and stoppered,” but he may as well be describing the book.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

On the morning of August 7, 1974, a French high-wire artist named Philippe Petit completed not just one but eight tightrope walks between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. This crazy-yet-true event is what connects every character in Colum McCann’s novel as they wander through a broken-down New York City during the last summer of the Vietnam War.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

The author of the Moomin series that I loved as a kid wrote a handful of books for adults, including this story of a six-year-old girl and her grandmother who are spending the summer on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The Summer Book is actually 22 beautiful, evocative vignettes that capture the sights and sounds of summer. (Keep this one in your back pocket for grey winter days.)

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

This lyrical, heart-breaking novel takes place over twelve days in August in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi; a timeframe that becomes even more intensely loaded when you realize that the hurricane that’s gathering strength over the Gulf of Mexico is Katrina. Esch and her brothers do their best to prepare what they can, but — aside from each other — there isn’t much they can save.

Outline by Rachel Cusk

A woman goes to Athens to teach a summer course on writing. She is divorced and has children. That’s almost all we know about the narrator of Outline, at least in terms of hard facts. Yet through the ten conversations that the narrator has with people she meets in Athens — notably people who are much more open about spilling the details of their lives —it becomes clear how much you can learn about someone by listening between the lines.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Asked to name a scene from The Great Gatsby, most people probably think of Nick staring at the green light at the end of the dock. But the scene that’s always stuck with me is the impromptu party that the Buchanans throw at the Plaza Hotel. Fitzgerald uses summer to perfect effect here: its claustrophobic, sticky heat, an atmosphere that’s uncomfortable and stifling in every sense of the words. In fact the whole plot of Gatsby mirrors the summer. The tension mounts with the heat, and the final denouement comes with the first chill of fall.

Nemesis by Philip Roth

Nemesis explores the effects of a polio epidemic on a closely knit Newark community during the summer of 1944. By setting his novel in a season that should be the most fun and carefree for children, Roth manages to heighten the already dark realities of polio for the children it struck: sickness, lifelong paralysis, and even death.

Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

In the summer of 1876, San Francisco was suffering from both a smallpox epidemic and a record-breaking heat wave. This hot, intense atmosphere is the backdrop to the story of Blanche Beunon, a burlesque dancer who is trying to solve her friend’s murder in a rough-and-tumble city that in many ways was still a part of the Wild West.

Among Strange Victims Captures the Complex Mind of an Outsider

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From Petronius’s Encolpius in The Satyricon to the visceral realists in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, intelligent and itinerant underachievers have served as astute critics of social conventions. These picaresque outsiders were gifted with clarity unequaled by their peers, and central to their lives were questions of how one ought to live: destitute but impassioned, or safely satisfied by the mind-numbing apathy of middle-class life?

Into this mix we can now add Rodrigo, the central character of Daniel Saldaña Paris’s debut novel in English, Among Strange Victims. A smart but aimless young man, Rodrigo works as a copy editor for the director of a museum, where he fantasizes about sleeping with his coworkers and sabotaging the speeches his boss delivers to investors. He’s an anti-intellectual, distrustful of the academy, though, as the son of an academic, he can’t shake off the education impressed on him by his mother. This education serves primarily to help him rationalize his disappointing life. Speaking about his dead-end job, Rodrigo claims, “This is freedom, I say to myself: an eight-hour day that, if I so wished, could be seven, or even less. An affirmation of will, but without necessary upheavals.”

A smart but aimless young man, Rodrigo works as a copy editor for the director of a museum, where he fantasizes about sleeping with his coworkers and sabotaging the speeches his boss delivers to investors

Freedom also includes contemplating used tea bags stapled to his wall and masturbating twice on Saturday. He lives alone in a small apartment overlooking a vacant lot home to a chicken. All is well for Rodrigo, until a case of mistaken identity propels him to marry his coworker, Cecilia. Though Rodrigo could have sorted out the mistake and avoided this conjugal sentence, he instead marries Cecilia. Predictably, the marriage grows stale. And Rodrigo becomes a tragic paradox: the picaresque character condemned to stasis.

The book’s second section pivots to a Spanish academic and lothario, Marcelo, on sabbatical in Mexico to research Richard Foret and Bee Langley, two overlooked modernist writers. Marcelo’s storyline alternates with that of Foret and Langley, a more traditionally picaresque narrative where comparison’s to Bolaño feel apt. Translator Christina MacSweeney has done an excellent job bringing the intelligent vitality of Paris’s prose into English, particularly in this passage describing Foret’s relationship to his contemporaries:

In Paris he had battled, with his own guts, against the castrating intellectualism of the Apollinaires, the soulless Cubists, the Marinettis of this world. Where in the work of these people was love, the unmoving motor of all the stasis, fixed point and vertex of the actions of men of real daring? Nothing of that was left, and only the pantomime of art, and Foret shat a million times on art.

The Foret and Langley sections are some of the strongest in the book. They are paced well and compellingly played against scenes of Marcelo hunting for houses in Mexico. As his trip continues, Marcelo grows tired of Foret’s incomprehensible manifesto, Considerations. He gravitates toward the poet Langley, but soon transfers his attention to a local professor who turns out to be Rodrigo’s mother.

Translator Christina MacSweeney has done an excellent job bringing the intelligent vitality of Paris’s prose into English

Marcelo’s and Rodrigo’s storylines converge when a recently laid-off Rodrigo moves in with his mother to get away from his wife. Cecilia stays in Mexico City, effectively ending their marriage, while Rodrigo stays behind to copy-edit for a colleague of Marcelo’s. There is no colleague, no book to edit, but Marcelo vouches for Rodrigo in a quid-pro-quo. Rodrigo must participate in a drug-riddled experiment run by an aging hippie. The two fall into a “complicity hatched in lying.”

Most of the second half of the novel is spent with Rodrigo as he grows increasingly vulnerable and self-aware. Philosophizing on the loneliness of marriage — a frequent habit — he says:

[marital loneliness] is more lonely than all other forms of loneliness, than sane, effective lonelinesses: the loneliness of the desert, of the widower, the loneliness of men who live surrounded by cats; marital loneliness is, I insist, more lonely than all the above because it imposes the necessity of being other.

Though Rodrigo’s theories are astute and enjoyable, it is unfortunate that the increased attention on Marcelo and Rodrigo means that Foret and Langley fade from the novel. However, the afterimage of their relationship pervades the novel. Their disappearance heightens the stark difference between how the two artists lived and how Marcelo and Rodrigo live. The lifestyle of Foret and Langley comes to seem impossible to recreate. What remains, in place of the artistic fervor that drove the two lovers, is a kind of spiritual torpor, the intellectualized idleness and middle-class domesticity of Rodrigo and Marcelo. What has happened to the life of the artist, Among Strange Victims asks. Why do we so often build critical distances between ourselves and our lives? And how can we bridge those gaps? The answers vary. Drugs, drinking, love, art making, even reading Bolaño — though this is played for a joke — all help us live in ways that feel authentic. By the end of the book, Paris suggests that there is little to learn from the self-obsessive fray of the present, and that only a calm understanding of the past that will allow us to move forward.

Hello, My Little Anger — An Essay by Gretchen Van Wormer

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We haven’t been in the North Carolina Aquarium twenty minutes before I’ve drunk the blue Kool-Aid and asked my mom if we can please, please, please take a picture of the Slippery Dick. I want a snap not of the fish (halichoeres bivittatus) but of the fish’s educational sign, which reads:

Slippery Dicks don’t change their stripes as they get older. Unlike most other wrasses, they contain the same color and pattern throughout their lives.

The fish’s coloring is gloriously day-glo, but what’s drawn me in is the cheap joke of its sign: “You dicks never change!”

My cell phone is ancient as a horseshoe crab and doesn’t take pictures, so my mom asks my stepfather to get the shot. Bryce checks his phone to make sure it came out all right, and when it’s clear it has, I’m thrilled.

It is a little awkward to be in your 30s and taking pictures of Slippery Dicks with your mom and your Bryce as part of the Thanksgiving holiday. But it’s not my fault the aquarium delights me. With my family, I become positively human. Earlier I reached into a shallow pool of water and swooned as rays rippled up to my hand like kittens wanting their heads pet. When a docent chided me for using my whole mitt to touch them, “Two fingers, please, so I don’t get fired,” it was only a little annoying, because my stingray high was compounded with my innuendo high. “Two fingers, please”? Come on.

I want to be disgusted by the aquarium. The otters rebounding off their rock wall and sliding through the water in a maddening loop remind me of all that’s wrong with these places. I believe the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh when he says nature has feelings for us: “Do you see a tree out there? That tree loves you.” Locking up these creatures seems like a stone-cold way to requite that love.

Still, there’s something refreshing about swimming with all the other fish and doing as the fishes do.

After the Dick-pic, I stand next to my mom as she does the oddest thing: She speaks to a fellow aquarium-goer. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” she says of the fish, admiring their tropical shades. The woman agrees cheerfully. “Stunning.” She takes out her cell phone, and my mom says, “Oh, let me get out of your way so you can get a good one.”

A couple years ago, at the Amazonia exhibit at the National Zoo, I stood passive-aggressively in front of the glass as another viewer tried to harass/film a swimming turtle in its lake-prison. I was on my own, doing research for an essay about how angry the zoo makes me. I finally caved and took a step back so the woman could follow its glide, and when a smile splashed across her face, I assumed this was not due to her love of the turtle, but to her love of winning the epic battle of she vs. me.

How could my mom not only talk to her woman, but offer to get out of her way? So disturbing.

The North Carolina Aquarium is riddled with photo ops, and now my mom is determined to support all of them. A family squeezes most of itself inside a replica of a Megalodon jaw, and my mom grins with an almost-drunken pleasure before saying to the mother of this devoured brood, “Do you want me to take the picture so you can get in there, too?”

“Oh, that would be great!” the other mother says, and my mom takes pics of various wacky poses before handing the phone back.

Later, after dallying at the octopus exhibit, I round a corner to see my mom engaged in a truly vulgar act. It’s bad enough that she’s supporting other visitors’ giant-creature-replica shots, but suddenly there’s Bryce with his head sticking out of a jumbo crustacean.

“Got it.” She beams.

There’s the fear of becoming your mother, and then there’s the fear of not becoming your mother.

I have vague recollections of teenage angst toward my mom, most of which ended with my slamming the door and her threatening to take it off its hinges. My sister, Heidi, was the same way. But by the time we surfaced from childhood and realized that other people’s fathers weren’t like ours — a suicidal, narcissistic, addicted man whose own mother called him a “dry drunk” (an alcoholic who, even when sober, is an asshole) — we were no longer concerned about our maternal DNA. Instead, whenever we didn’t like how the other was acting, we’d dump on each other: “You’re reminding me of Dad right now!” or, “That’s so ‘Stanley J.’ of you!” It was icy water.

My parents finally divorced when I was eighteen and my sister twenty. The day my father moved out, I suggested my mom uncork a festive bottle of wine. It was like a hatch had swung open and I was free.

She met Bryce a couple years later. I must’ve been a touch hostile, because one afternoon, when I was home from college, she turned to me gently and said, “Has Bryce ever done anything to make you…uncomfortable?”

“God, no,” I said. “Never. Not at all.”

He’d only ever been nice. And my college was in New Orleans, a time zone and many states away, which should’ve made me feel liberated no matter what. But I was terrified that whatever had opened would close. I didn’t trust her.

My aquarium-ire is benevolent; it feeds on sympathy for the creatures, not on the creatures themselves. When I look back on the accusations of being like Dad, though, I can’t help but see these screaming matches as a beastlier species. The kind of being that hates parts of itself, and takes this out on another because they’ve got those parts too. “You’re all stings!” “You’re the one with the freakin’ barbs!!”

A slow evolver, I’ve taken eons to grasp that ugliness shares habitat with loveliness, and will predate the lovely if left unattended.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher who knows the trees love us, has pointed out that it’s not intelligent to see ourselves as existing apart from our environment, including our families:

We say our father is not us, but without our father, we cannot exist. So he is fully present in our body and in our mind…There are so many other non-self elements that you can touch and recognize within yourself — your ancestors, the earth, the sun, water, air, all the food you eat, and much more. It may seem like these things are separate from you, but without them you could not live.

He teaches that everything in us, even anger, is a vital organ, like the heart or lungs. We cannot pitch it when it bothers us. We have to love it:

The first function of mindfulness is to recognize, not fight. “Breathing in, I know that anger has manifested in me. Hello, my little anger.” And breathing out, “I will take good care of you.”

I’ve wanted to toss my father, my anger, because I understood them to be separate from my true and healthy self. There’s a lot of “best self” nonsense out there, and what it seems to amount to is that all unflattering aspects of oneself can be expunged. But this is as absurd as trying to restyle a Slippery Dick’s color patterns. You have to take care of the dickishness you’ve got. That’s the only way to chill.

At the aquarium, Bryce has succumbed to fish fatigue and found a quiet spot to fiddle with his cell phone while my mom and I wander around. Later we’ll hit the gift shop. It’s wondrously normal.

I don’t want to be a total downer about this captivity thing, so I give in to the baser desire of zenning out with the moon jellyfish. My mom and I watch as they float brainlessly by, pink clovers of brine shrimp traced on their translucent bells.

They’re so graceful that I almost forget they’ve got their own venom. Jellyfish don’t sting themselves, though, and they don’t sting members of their same-species swarm. Their tentacles have special receptors that recognize the chemistry of their own, and these receptors work like a safety switch, turning off the toxic quills.

I don’t know yet what will bring forgiveness of my father into being. But I do see that I must be kinder to myself. And that withholding this kindness has made me ill.

Mom, Bryce, and I leave the aquarium and step into a cool drizzle. At a restaurant twenty minutes away, we order calamari without irony. It’s delicious, and I feel grateful that the open water is so near.

Sex with Shakespeare: Kink and Secrecy in Singapore

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Most nights, after work, I went out for drinks with Nikolai, the director of Macbeth. “You look distracted,” he said one evening. “What’s on your mind?”

I winced. I knew exactly what was on my mind. Ever since Oman, where some women in the Shakespeare class had introduced me to bootlegged DVDs of The O.C., I’d been a huge fan of the pulpy teen drama. By the time I moved to Singapore, however, the show had been canceled and the Internet had given me something even better: The O.C. spanking fan fiction. It exists, it is awesome, and it, as usual, was on my mind that evening. Nikolai was innovative, artistic, and nonjudgmental. If I had been fantasizing about Angelina Jolie in a black leather catsuit — in other words, the “sexy” stereotype of BDSM — I probably would have shared the fantasy. Nikolai would have laughed. But it’s one thing to be edgy; it’s quite another to fantasize about Sandy Cohen, with the epic eyebrows, spanking Ryan Atwood. So, no, my boss didn’t need to know what was on my mind.

But it’s one thing to be edgy; it’s quite another to fantasize about Sandy Cohen, with the epic eyebrows, spanking Ryan Atwood.

“I’m not thinking anything,” I said, too loudly. “Let’s drink.”

We did. We drank so much that, before long, we were drunk. Nikolai and I stumbled out of the wine bar and danced down a brick path near Robertson Quay, a posh stretch of restaurants, bars, and clubs along the river. A loose brick jutted out from the path.

“Get it!” Nikolai urged. “Pull it out!”

Giggling with the rush of being bad, I pulled the brick out of the path and threw it in the river. (I regret this. As a guest in Singapore, I had a responsibility to behave better.)

Then we ran.

“We’re in trouble now,” Nikolai joked. “They’re going to cane us!” (As the world was reminded during the 1994 Michael Fay controversy, when an American eighteen-year-old was sentenced to receive four cane strokes on his bare buttocks, the Singaporean judicial system employs corporal punishment.)

“Not me,” I teased. “Singaporean courts don’t cane women. Only men.”

“Really?” Nikolai said. I nodded.

“Trust me,” I slurred. “I know everything there is to know about judicial caning.” (Remember all those middle-school book reports on corporal punishment?)

Nikolai grinned.

“Since we’re being naughty tonight, shall we be really naughty?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Always,” I replied.

Section 377A of the Singaporean Penal Code states: “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or abets the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years.” In other words, the Singaporean penal code criminalizes homosexuality.

Nikolai is gay.

“Let’s go to a gay bar,” he suggested.

“Do you know where to find one?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied.

Nikolai didn’t just know where to find one — he knew them all. So we went on a pub crawl that night, walking from nondescript bar to nondescript bar. The more I drank, the less it felt like we were breaking a law. What at first had felt naughty felt, in no time, normal.

“Are you scared the government will come after you?” I asked the owner of one club.

He shrugged.

“Not really,” he said. “They leave us alone.”

I imagine that with regard to unenforced prohibitions, Singapore is a bit like Shakespeare’s England. During his life, homosexuality was technically punishable with harsh laws. But those laws were rarely enforced. As Bruce Smith pointed out, during the combined forty-five years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the twenty-three years of James I’s reign, there was only one sodomy conviction — and that was for sex with a five-year-old boy, so it would be more accurate to call it a rape conviction.

I imagine that with regard to unenforced prohibitions, Singapore is a bit like Shakespeare’s England. During his life, homosexuality was technically punishable with harsh laws.

King James — yes, the same one who sponsored the King James Bible, and the patron for whom Shakespeare wrote Macbeth — may have even been gay or bisexual himself. (But it’s important to remember that, at that period, those terms didn’t exist. It’s possible that people then understood sexuality as something more fluid. A lot of how we understand our identities is culturally and historically specific.) James had a wife and three children, but he also spoke quite candidly about his passionate love for men, especially George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. “You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else,” said James to his Privy Council in 1617, in what some scholars believe was an early defense of same-sex love. “I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.” And in 1624, during his last illness, James sent Buckingham a telling letter, begging him to come to his bedside:

I cannot content myself without sending you this billet,

praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting

with you, and that we may make at this Christenmass a

new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for God so love

me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and

that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with

you, than live a sorrowful widow-life without you. And so

God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye

may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

Although most surviving literary references to homosexuality from this period refer to same-sex attraction between men, writers were also aware of lesbian attraction. In one remarkable poem, John Donne — a poet and cleric in the Church of England — imagined sexual desire between women:

My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,

But so as thine from one another do,

And, O, no more: the likeness being such,

Why should they not alike in all parts touch?

Hand to strange hand, lip to lip none denies;

Why should they breast to breast, or thighs to thighs?

Shakespeare’s own possible homoerotic interests have also been the subject of debate. Although he married Anne Hathaway and fathered three children with her, some readers cite the sonnets as evidence of Shakespeare’s bisexuality. Twenty-six of the sonnets are addressed to a married woman, who has often been called the “Dark Lady.” But one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) seem to be addressed to a young man, often called the “Fair Lord” or “Fair Youth.” (Sonnet 20 explicitly bemoans the fact that this young man is not female.) Some scholars theorize that this young man might be the same

“Mr. W. H.” to whom the sonnets were addressed. Maybe Shakespeare was bisexual. Others reject that theory; after all, there’s no reason to assume the sonnets are autobiographical.

What the Singaporean bartender had told me that night seemed true. No one in the club acted worried about an imminent raid. Despite their clandestine nature, the bars we visited did not feel shrouded by fear. I glanced around the room, pausing to wave hello to Antonio from The Merchant of Venice. Patrons laughed and flirted. Everyone seemed to be having a good time.

Maybe this wasn’t so bad.

Then I saw a familiar face.

One man wasn’t having fun.

I had met Edwin, a Singaporean friend, at a mutual friend’s beach party on Sentosa Island. We had bonded over our mutual long-distance relationships: my boyfriend was in New York; his girlfriend was in Kuala Lumpur. After that, Edwin and I ran into each other at parties or dinners every few months. He was smart and funny. I liked Edwin, though we didn’t share political views.

“It’s not biblical,” Edwin told me once when same-sex marriage came up. “It’s perverse.”

Tonight, in a secret gay bar with no sign on the door, Edwin sat alone. He gazed around the room, both hands on a glass of beer. His eyes were hungry and sad.

“It’s not biblical,” Edwin told me once when same-sex marriage came up. “It’s perverse.”

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” begins Macbeth’s most famous incantation. Everything in the play is double. Macbeth and Banquo are like “cannons overcharg’d with double cracks,” who “doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.” When King Duncan stays at the Macbeths’ castle, where he will be murdered, it is “in double trust,” and Lady Macbeth promises that their care of him will be “in every point twice done and then done double.” Later, Macbeth tries to kill Macduff in an attempt to “make assurance double sure,” only to discover that the witches have toyed with him in “a double sense.”

Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head by Johann Heinrich Füssli

Macbeth is a play about doubles. But there is a twist.

In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the hero (or antihero) often has a “double,” or voice — a secondary character who speaks for the central figure, linking him to the real world and to the audience. Marjorie Garber describes these sidekicks as “someone on the stage who encounters things and verifies [that what seems] impossible or unbearable [is], nonetheless, true.” In Hamlet, Horatio fills that role: at the end of the play, Horatio is the one who promises to tell Hamlet’s story. In King Lear, that voice is Edgar. (“I would not take this from report. It is, and my heart breaks at it,” he says at one impossibly sad moment.)

Macbeth’s obsession with equivocation speaks to this idea of double voices. The word equivocation itself comes from the Latin word æquivocus, which means “of equal voice.” In Macbeth, where even the fundamental premise of the play demands verification — are the witches “real,” or merely a product of Macbeth’s imagination? — that double voice is more important than ever. At first, Banquo fills that role. He links Macbeth (and Macbeth) to the audience. Indeed, Banquo seems to speak for us. “Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” he asks, after the weyard sisters first appear. We know Banquo saw the sisters, too. Unlike the dagger that Macbeth sees (or imagines) before he kills King Duncan, Banquo’s voice verifies for the audience — and, indeed, for Macbeth himself — that these sisters do exist.

But Macbeth has a twist that sets it apart from every other Shakespearean tragedy: Macbeth murders his voice. Mad with fear that Banquo’s heirs will seize the throne, Macbeth has Banquo killed. After that, our antihero is on his own. There is no one left to verify what is real and what is not. Macbeth sees — or imagines — Banquo’s ghost at a feast, and from then on, there is nothing good left in his life. In fact, the night that Banquo dies is the very last time we see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who previously had the strongest marriage in the Shakespearean canon, speak to each other. When Macbeth’s voice dies, everything else disappears, too. Macbeth is alone.

When Macbeth’s voice dies, everything else disappears, too. Macbeth is alone.

He can’t survive that way. No person can.

In the bar, I lowered my face and walked over to Nikolai.

“We have to leave,” I muttered. “My friend is here.” I had invaded a safe space. Edwin didn’t want to be seen.

Nikolai chugged the rest of his drink and hopped to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said. We slipped out of the club.

Whenever Singaporean friends tried to defend 377A, they always emphasized the fact that it is rarely enforced.

“Homosexuals can do whatever they want,” a colleague once told me. “They just have to keep it private.”

“Privacy” is one of the most potent and insidious weapons a sexual majority can use against people with nonnormative sexual identities.

But the look on Edwin’s face that night told me a different story. I recognized the expression. “Privacy” is one of the most potent and insidious weapons a sexual majority can use against people with nonnormative sexual identities. “Privacy” sounds good. It sounds responsible and mature. But “privacy” is tied up with isolation and shame. It drives people underground. It puts people in danger.

“Privacy” palters with us in a double sense.

Sexuality doesn’t just appear at age eighteen. Like everyone else, kinky kids grow up with questions about our emerging sexualities. The difference is that, unlike people who grow up with normative sexual orientations, we can’t turn to pop culture for answers. There are almost no books, TV shows, or movies that show people like us, or relationships like the ones I craved, in a healthy or positive light. Our fear and shame doesn’t just come from negative messages; it comes from the lack of positive ones. When culture insists that people keep their “private” lives “private,” those who fall outside the norm fall through the cracks. We have no way to learn how to explore our fantasies safely.

One thing we do have is the Internet. Sexual minorities feel “private” online.

Predators feel “private” online, too.

When my friend Beth was sixteen, she met a fifty-four- year-old sadist on an Internet message board. His name was Logan. Beth was exactly like me at that age: obsessed with spanking and desperate to connect. She talked to Logan because she had no one else. After a few months of emails, Logan drove to Beth’s boarding school. She was nervous, but felt obligated to meet him. She didn’t want to be rude. He had made hotel reservations. So Beth got permission to leave school grounds for the weekend.

Beth was exactly like me at that age: obsessed with spanking and desperate to connect.

Beth was a virgin. She had never even been kissed. (For obvious reasons, her story hits close to home with me.) She didn’t want to have sex with Logan; she just needed to explore her masochistic impulses. But Beth was a good girl. She knew that she was supposed to keep her private life private. So she didn’t tell any of her friends where she was going that weekend. She didn’t tell anyone whom she was going to meet. Her only safety precaution was to leave a sealed envelope on her desk, with all the information she knew about Logan, just in case.

It was Friday. No one expected her back at school until Sunday night. If Beth disappeared, her friends would not find the envelope until a few days later.

“I was a rational, levelheaded kid,” Beth told me. “But the desire for it was more important than not getting murdered.”

To respect Beth’s privacy, I’ll leave out the rest of her story. Rest assured: no one had to open that sealed envelope. Beth went on to graduate school, became a top professional in her field, and eventually found healthy, safe, loving ways to explore her fetish with wonderful partners. In the end, things worked out. But the point is that when a kink is lifelong, innate, and unchosen — as it is for people like me and Beth, and many others — it mixes with stigma and “privacy” into danger.

We take risks because the isolation and emptiness of the alternative is worse.

I was lucky. I met John. He and I made mistakes — big ones, in some cases — but I stayed, for the most part, safe. Stories like Beth’s are common, but I was the safe one.

Think about that: I dropped out of high school, moved to a foreign country, and let a drug dealer whip me bloody before I had even learned about safe words — and compared to dozens of other stories I’ve heard, mine was the “safe” path.

Without sexual privacy, discretion suffers. Without sexual transparency, people suffer.

My “privacy,” unlike Edwin’s, was, for the most part, not the product of institutionalized government oppression. (That being said, fetishists can and do lose jobs, security clearances, or child custody battles because of our consensual orientations; in some places, consensual kink is explicitly illegal.) The biggest thing choking me was me. I’d been force-fed stigma for so long, I had lost the gag reflex to resist. If the men and women of Pink Dot, a grassroots Singaporean movement for LGBT equality, could challenge their government, I had no excuse to cower behind my own shame.

The biggest thing choking me was me. I’d been force-fed stigma for so long, I had lost the gag reflex to resist.

Nikolai and I said good night and I walked home. I lived on the forty-fourth floor of a skyscraper on Cantonment Road, in an apartment I shared with three flatmates. One entire wall of my bedroom was a huge window. I sat on my bed and remembered the expression on Edwin’s face. The city skyline sparkled before me.

I thought I’d been so honest with David, but that wasn’t true. I had doubled myself up so many times that I was more tightly folded than any origami crane. It would be impossible for anyone to read what had been written on my page. I was so repressed I couldn’t breathe.

The façade of honesty is more dangerous than a lie. I was that equivocator. I was the fiend who lies like truth. The two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art both had my face.

The Hiddleston Man: On the Competing Masculinities of ‘High-Rise’

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He was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of force running through the building, almost as if Anthony Royal had deliberately designed his body to be held within their grip.— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

J.G. Ballard’s vertical-living dystopia, High-Rise is oppressively preoccupied with the body as both flesh and metaphor. Early on in the novel, which is narrated by three different male voices (that of the building’s architect, Anthony Royal; new tenant, Dr. Richard Laing; and lower-floor resident, Richard Wilder), we are given perhaps the most explicit acknowledgement of Ballard’s urban planning metaphor. Having been lured into a social gathering at one of his new neighbor’s apartments, Dr. Laing is listening intently to a description of the building “as some kind of huge animate presence.” “There was something in this feeling,” Laing informs us: “the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridor were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurons of the brain.”

The narrative of High-Rise centers on the very disintegration of this imagined body politic. Neurons falter, arteries begin to clot, and eventually all that’s left is a thirst for destruction. The claustrophobic hierarchical structure of the building is transformed into an anarchic environment, its inhabitants giving in to their worst impulses — a Lord of the Flies of the skyscraper era. That’s where Ballard opens, exposing us, with his devilishly dark comedic wit, to the rotting body of the eponymous community at the novel’s center: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog,” the book begins, “Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

A stylish (every)man, out of time and place amidst a ravaged civilization.

Borrowing this striking and disconcerting imagery for his filmic adaptation of High-Rise, director Ben Wheatley opens with Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) — wearing impeccably well-fitted slacks with his shirtsleeves rolled up — petting and then roasting a German Shepherd. I’m sure I was supposed to be taken aback by the barbarity of the situation, and yet I was mostly engrossed by Hiddleston’s wardrobe. Even after he’s butchered the dog (off-camera) the blood-splattered shirt remains effortlessly elegant, less a sign of his downward spiral than a suggestion that he remains in control. I couldn’t help but gawk at the actor’s lithe build, accentuated by this curious if telling costume choice — a stylish (every)man, out of time and place amidst a ravaged civilization.

Not even ten minutes later, Wheatley gives us a scene in which Laing luxuriously sunbathes in the nude on this very same balcony. We’ve been sent back in time, in order to account for the “unusual events” that had taken place three months prior. Blissfully unaware of his surroundings (as in the novel, the doctor enjoys the privacy the high-rise affords him, an imagined solitary confinement within an expansive and faceless community), Laing is startled awake by a crash. A bottle, it turns out, has been dropped from even higher above. We get what is likely to be the most GIF-ed moment from the entire film: a startled Laing hurriedly getting up, forcing the actor to hide his privates under the book that had been resting on his crotch. It’s a brief moment, underscoring Dr. Laing’s lack of privacy, but it also gives us one of the last glimpses of that clean-shaven compact body. Never again will Laing offer himself up to such scrutiny.

As the film continues, Hiddleston’s body will become inviolate, impenetrable, his suit and tie an armor that will keep him from falling into the type of lunacy that presumably afflicts his neighbors. Tellingly, his dual sex scenes — with two different neighbors who seem to find his Byronic posturing alluring, despite the chaos — show even less of the doctor than the brief moment on the balcony, in direct contrast to Richard Wilder (Luke Evans). In the book, Ballard describes Wilder as the strongest man in the building, with a “barrel-like chest” which he shows off “with some pride.” Laing, we’re told, “noticed that he was continually touching himself, for ever inspecting the hair on his massive calves, smelling the back of his scarred hands, as if he had just discovered his own body.” And while Wheatley’s film doesn’t quite push Wilder far enough (in the novel he eventually lives up to his name, shedding all his clothes, branding himself with makeshift tribal markings, devolving into an incomprehensible language) we are nevertheless encouraged to focus on his coarse and imposing body.

Luke Evans as Richard Wilder in ‘High-Rise’ (2015)

While Laing always looks like he’s just stepped off a GQ spread, Wilder is earthy and unequivocally tied to the film’s period. His bushy and messy sideburns match his unruly hair, while his denim shirt barely conceals the hirsute body that is always threatening to burst out, hinting at the simmering violent streak which eventually undoes him. Since Wheatley cuts back on the role of the architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons, playing with his signature imperiousness a character emasculated by the very community of women he’s inadvertently fostered), the film must instead rely on Wilder and Laing to give us two competing visions of contemporary masculinity.

Wheatley’s adaptation dismantles the sexist humanist language at work in the author’s rhetoric.

Considering that High-Rise eventually enshrines Laing — or rather, finds in his clean and muted aesthetic the only male role model worth letting survive — we might read it as a repudiation of Wilder’s masculine excess (“Our lives are too messy, Richard!” his wife complains), one which drives him towards senseless and barbaric violence (“He’s raping people he’s not supposed to and, to top it all off, he shat in Mercer’s attaché case,” a character yells). Laing’s charming swagger, by comparison, embodied by Internet boyfriend Hiddleston, emerges as a welcome palliative, though it also feels like an aspirational twisting of Ballard’s character.

Cover of first edition, 1975

The Laing of the book was openly ruthless in his self-survival, happy to live in incest in order to secure his sister’s apartment, a tenant in his building conspicuously absent from the film. Hiddleston’s Laing, on the other hand, is a dispassionate vision of tame masculinity. “You’re an excellent specimen,” he is told by Charlotte (Sienna Miller) when she discovers him sunbathing. The women of the high-rise eventually if implicitly anoint him de facto leader of their broken community, a new surrogate father figure for young Toby (Louis Suc), Charlotte’s son, who occupies the very last frame of the film. Looking like a curious young version of Laing — with the suit and tie to match — nerd Toby is tipped as the imagined future in Wheatley’s film world.

If the appeal of the high-rise in Ballard’s novel lay in the fact that it “was an environment built not for man, but for man’s absence,” Wheatley’s adaptation dismantles the sexist humanist language at work in the author’s rhetoric. We are left instead with a masculine body inviolate, epitomized by a hapless but cunning child and a roguish gentleman who exude non-threatening postures of masculinity, and who remain devoted and dependent on the women around them.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: My Guilt

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★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

I always try to keep a pleasant disposition, even in the face of people talking during a movie, but the truth is, I have a lot of guilt that can get me down.

There’s the guilt I feel for the time as a child that I tore off the wings of a monarch and glued them to my back to try and fly. That poor butterfly was still alive while I jumped around like an idiot. Or the time I told my nephew that Santa Claus was real, and then when my nephew learned the truth, he gave me the dirtiest look and didn’t speak to me for 12 years. One of the things I feel most guilty about is how I handled my wife’s funeral.

The point is I’m holding onto over 80 years of compounded guilt. Each year of my life brings more and more guilt. I’ve tried to balance it out by doing good things just for the sake of it. Like when I see a person pulled over with a flat tire, I will always stop and tell them how to fix it, even if they say they don’t need my help. People can be prideful and stubborn about accepting help.

Another way I try to alleviate my guilt is to compare my misdeeds to the misdeeds of others. An old colleague of mine recently tried to end her life by driving herself and her entire family into a pond. Everyone survived but she must live with the guilt of ruining the car and getting everyone soaking wet. She can never undo that.

Sometimes at night my guilt will wake me up in a cold sweat. That’s why I keep a towel next to my bed, to wipe the guilt away. If I can’t quickly locate the towel in the dark I grow panicked and start screaming, “Get this guilt off of me! Get it off!”

There’s one thing I feel very guilty for that I’ve never told anyone about, but I think it’s time I got it off my chest. Last year I adopted an orphan through a Russian website, and after transferring the $75,000 fee via something called Bitcoin, they put him on a plane to America. But I chickened out and never went to pick him up. I have no idea what happened to him. He might still be waiting for me. If you see a lonely Russian child standing at the airport with a pile of luggage, please take him home. He’s already been paid for.

Admitting my mistake will likely cause this article to go viral and make me the ire of people around the world. I’ll be known as the guy who abandons orphans. I’m willing to accept that. What I did was wrong, but at my age, adopting someone is irresponsible. I could die tomorrow and then he’d be an orphan all over again and he might have to dispose of my body. My guilt in the afterlife would have been too much to bear.

BEST FEATURE: All the guilt-sweat means my body gets rid of a lot of toxins.
WORST FEATURE: The slow, gnawing away of my insides.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a can of tuna.

Finding a Brazilian Stranger in a Quiet Creature on the Corner

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Approaching a translated book is like drawing near a tamed animal. There is the nature of the beast at its core — the original language, the other, the scary place that one doesn’t understand the connotations and nuances of — and the facade that the beast wears of a domesticated animal, trained by the translator into the language one knows well, is familiar with, feels safe in. But tamed animals are at their most beautiful and vivid in the moments of wildness, where their nature takes over and one is swept away — maybe into danger, maybe merely into adventure, certainly into something mysterious.

[T]he reader is capable of more than even she thinks.

The best translators, I find, are the ones who allow for the rhythm of that wildness to remain rippling below the surface for the reader to find at unexpected moments. This means also allowed for confusion, for occasional misunderstanding, for the possibility of fear, but there is something trusting in that act, in believing that the reader is capable of more than even she thinks. Adam Morris, translating the words of Joao Gilberto Noll in Quiet Creature on the Corner is one of these fine translators. And perhaps because of this, I cannot quite wrap my head around the book itself.

It’s important to put the book into context. Noll is a well regarded Brazilian writer whose work has only selectively been translated into English, and he has been a visiting scholar at various international universities. This book came out originally in 1991, a year after I was born, when Brazil was going through the turmoil of transitioning to a democracy after many years of military dictatorship with nominal and symbolic yet utterly meaningless elections. This background is crucial to understanding — rather, to attempting to understand — the novel.

On its face, the plot is quite simple. An unnamed narrator, a poet, lives with his mother in a squat in Porto Alegre. One night, for unknowable reasons, he rapes a girl. The next day, his mother leaves to go live with her sister in another city. The rape victim apparently reports the crime and the narrator spends a night in prison. He then hallucinates or dreams up a whole life in which he and the girl he raped, Mariana, live harmoniously together on a farm and have a child. He wakes up in a clinic that has given him books and paper to write on. Why he is in this clinic, what kind of clinic it is, is a mystery that remains unsolved. Soon, however, he’s whisked away by a man named Kurt to a mansion where he is to spend his days in the company of Kurt himself, Kurt’s wife Gerda, another man, Otavio, and a servant, Amalia. He embarks on an affair with the latter, watches Gerda die beneath him during intercourse (and ejaculates into her dead body), and has a one night stand with a black woman, an apparent longtime fantasy of his, before writing his last poem ever and quite possibly living in Kurt’s manor forever.

But who among us hasn’t dreamed of having every want and need fulfilled — of having endless space and time in which to write?

But the plot, strange and surreal and inexplicable, almost seems secondary to the nature of the book. It reminded my of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, in that the narrator has a detachment from the world around him and seems to lack empathy or even much interest in others. Seeing the world through his lens is bleakly egotistical, yet there’s something forbidden and alluring in that viewpoint, one that is rare to adopt in real lives. But who among us hasn’t dreamed of having every want and need fulfilled — of having endless space and time in which to write — where one’s faintest and most urgent bodily needs are fulfilled without any need to worry about the consequences to others? Maybe in a world full of turmoil, when the social norms are crumbling in the face of a hope that is too terrifying to truly grasp, self serving is the only way to be.

As in The Stranger, perhaps the narrator isn’t one hundred percent heartless, for he takes pains to write to his mother from the manor and to tell her that he won’t be in touch for a long time but that she shouldn’t worry. The narrator confesses to being a bad liar in person, but, he says, “since I was writing someone a lie that I had the feeling they were ready to believe, I got swept up in euphoria, as if I were close, very close, to a state that would represent for me, just maybe, a kind of emancipation.” Having gotten away with rape and being given the space and time to write, it seems that indeed the narrator achieves this freedom.

Is he maybe speaking of a larger freedom?

Is he maybe speaking of a larger freedom? Is the transition to democracy meant to be paralleled in the narrator? I feel unequipped to answer this question and fear that I may be reading too deeply into this. But this is where the translation can only do what it does — give me language with which to infer, to assume, rather than the cultural knowledge to assert those assumptions with confidence.