Things We Don’t Write: K. Anis Ahmed On The Murdered Writers Of Bangladesh

Posted on by 007595

We’ve asked some of our favorite international authors to write about literary communities and cultures around the globe. We’re bringing you their essays in a new ten-part series: The Writing Life Around the World. The fourth installment is by Bangladeshi author K. Anis Ahmed.

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Things we don’t write about: The Prophet. The Quran. The mosque. The hijab. Indeed, anything to do with Islam that might offend anyone willing to kill. The problem is that we can never be certain what will offend them. The killing types are no longer visible, wizened old men who regularly announce where the red line lays. The mantle has passed onto teenagers wielding machetes, belonging to secret cliques, guided by international ideologies with vicious local consequences.

Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year…

In a bewildering new trend, it is young rationalist bloggers in Bangladesh who have emerged as the primary target of Islamic extremists. How peculiar indeed, that killers espousing a retrograde vision of the world should be so obsessed with the most twenty-first century of media: the blog. Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim.

There is a specific history at play here. The secular bloggers of Bangladesh led a mass secular movement in 2013 demanding the death penalty for war crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. What’s unfolding now is in great part payback for the “insolence” of those seeking belated justice for a long-ignored genocide.

The first blogger was killed in 2013, at the height of the movement. Spring 2014 and Spring 2015 both saw an upsurge in political violence that targeted general civilians. At the same time, there was a renewal of blogger killings with the hacking of Avijit Roy just outside the Ekushey Book Fair. The Fair commemorates the 1952 Language Movement, which triggered Bangladesh’s eventual bid for full independence, and remains one of the most cherished symbols of the country’s cultural identity. To kill a free-thinker at the site of that cherished event was a deliberate attack on not just the victim, but on all those who shared his vision of Bangladesh as a bastion of secular, progressive ideals.

Bangl_Movements

* * *

What then does it mean to be a writer today in this, Bangladesh’s “new normal”? When I wrote my first complete story back on Thanksgiving Day in 1989, I did not imagine this future for my country. Like any young writer, I was consumed with putting the story together, making it cohere, making it interesting. Like others of my age, I also cultivated an appropriate amount of existential angst — having just recently discovered Camus, Sartre, Kafka and Kundera, that seemed like a prerequisite for becoming a writer of any worth.

But 1989 was a signal year in two opposed ways: it was the year that the Iranian regime passed its fatwa on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. It was also the year that Bangladesh’s nearly decade-long pro-democracy movement hurtled into a final phase, with an accompanying upswing in progressive cultural expressions.

…the theocrats had found a viciously efficient way to extend their grasp internationally.

The first of the two events, the Rushdie Affair, left an indelible mark on me as an apprentice writer. Even back then, a creeping realization came over me: the theocrats had found a viciously efficient way to extend their grasp internationally. I took the Rushdie affair as counsel to steer clear of the subject of religion. Apart from one early work, a novella (Forty Steps), I have rarely referred to any Islamic tenets in my fiction, and then too never in a critical manner. But to avoid the topic entirely is frankly impossible.

All writers are bound to mine the culture in which they were brought up, but in Muslim societies alone, there are classes of fanatics who have arrogated to themselves the power both to regularly denounce people for blasphemy, and to carry out their death sentences with horrific impunity. So while a high risk can attach to any author who dares speak of Islam, writers who count Muslim culture as a part of their personal heritage face the pain of having to treat the most natural of materials as one filled with toxic risk.

When Forty Steps was published in Bangla at the Ekushey Book Fair in 2006, a small troupe of self-styled Islamic guardians with their towering head-dress and long, flapping outfits marched over to the stall and demanded the book. It was an obscure literary work that used the popular lore of the angels Munkar and Nakir to frame the story. Hearing the incident, I was struck that even such an obscure, literary work should catch the attention of the self-appointed custodians of religious rectitude. In that instance, thankfully, the vigilantes left satisfied: stall, book, and my safety intact.

Even after that incident, though, some of my stories have turned to Islamic literary tradition as an integral part of the context of the narrative or a character. After all, no writer should have to shy away from material that is genuinely compulsive and important. But because there is no guarantee that the pathologically intolerant will agree, Muslim writers — and also others who find Islam or Muslim cultures to be a compelling topic — are thus finding themselves forced to contend with a heightened pressure of self-censorship, and mortal risk.

The condition for anyone wishing to write about Islam is thus comparable to dissidents of another era who lived under dictatorial regimes. In a twisted irony of globalization though, the risk is no longer confined by territory; it is outsourced to lethal effect. There was a time when political dissidents could escape their own country, mainly to the First World, and find a safe haven. For anyone tangling with Islam, however, there is no refuge on earth.

* * *

Life in Dhaka felt abuzz with creativity and defiance.

While the Rushdie Affair inaugurated a new era of Islamic intolerance, and even as it made a strong impression on me as an aspiring writer, I was however not worried about the atmosphere of my country at the time. As the pro-democracy movement came forward and eventually ousted the dictator Ershad, a spate of feisty new weeklies — Jai Jai Din, Bichinta and Khoborer Kagoj — became vocal against not only the military regime but also social orthodoxies. Life in Dhaka felt abuzz with creativity and defiance.

Khoborer Kagoj was owned by my family. Leading poets like Shamsur Rahman and Syed Shamsul Huq wrote weekly columns there. Authors like Rafiqul Islam, M. R. Akhter Mukul and Bhasha Matin provided witness to the country’s history of progressive struggles from the Language Movement of 1952 to the Liberation War of 1971. Self-proclaimed atheists such as Ahmed Sharif and Humayun Azad commented freely against dogma. One of the most sadly famous of Bangladeshi authors today, Taslima Nasreen, made her debut as a columnist.

It was hard to imagine in those heady and hopeful days that the roster of Kagoj columnists would come to comprise a wretched honor roll of victims, as anti-liberation forces gained power by attaching themselves to a mainstream party: Nasreen was hounded into exile in the early 90s. A decade later, Rahman, by then an aged laureate, suffered knife wounds from an attack by fanatics in his own home. In 2004, Azad, an outspoken critic of Islamism in politics, was struck outside the Ekushey Book Fair — like the blogger Avijit Roy this year — and died later that year in Germany.

There is of course a deeper history here. Bangladeshi authors have faced Islamist reprisals long before the era of petro-dollar-fueled Islamism. Like the poet Daud Haider who was imprisoned “for his own protection” in 1973 after coming under attack by Islamic clerics of entirely indigenous make. He later escaped into exile and to this day lives in Germany.

Much closer to home, quite literally, my grandfather was also taken into “protective custody” a year after Haider’s troubles, for similar offenses. An eccentric autodidact, he had penned a book about language and literacy, but clerics took an exception to a particular chapter in the book that touched on religion. Thanks to the ill-fated intellectual adventure of my grandfather, my earliest memories include the warden’s room in Dhaka Central Jail: high ceilings, a large black desk and glass-cabinets full of moldy files.

Given that I was initiated into the dangers presented by the most narrow-minded custodians of Islam at an early age, I should not be entirely surprised at the vicious new bloom of bigotry. But at the same time, the spirited free-thinking days of the early ’90s is also an equally authentic part of our heritage and who we are. Our war of independence was in fact fought over these divergent ideas of who we wanted to be: a country that believed in freedom and dignity, or one that prized prejudice and proscriptions.

Bangl_writers

clockwise from top left, Daud Haider, Avijit Roy, Taslima Nasreen
Humayun Azad, Shamsur Rahman

* * *

The Blogger Killings mark the most brutal new assault by the forces of prejudice. Indeed, not since the Liberation War of 1971 have we seen such concerted violence against free thought and free speech. At the peak of the Shahbagh Movement, a section of Islamic clerics presented the government with a list of 84 bloggers they accused of blasphemy. All the bloggers killed this year are names that had appeared on that list. A few, like the latest victim Niladri Niloy, could not save himself even after he changed his job and his residence. Everyone on that list thus remains utterly vulnerable to an attack at any moment.

It would be comforting to frame this Islamism only as an outside influence, but that would be a sad self-deception in a culture where a majority of the people, according to some recent polls, now believes that blasphemers should be hanged. Bangladesh’s Blogger Killings are thus not caused by sudden upsurge of Islamism, but related to a long-running political contest between two visions of the country: secular and progressive versus Islamist.

Two decades of economic progress has made us soft. We no longer have any appetite for political or idealistic fights. The good are lacking conviction, even clarity, while the worst are bristling with passionate intensity.

Now they say, if only bloggers would simply show some restraint, then there would not be so much commotion. But recent history has taught us, feeding the tiger only gives it greater appetite. Recently, new hit lists have been issued naming a much wider range of people — politicians, academics, activists. All the persons named so far are leading figures in their respective fields, with no record of criticism of Islam, but invariably with a progressive bent.

The space for freedom is rapidly reaching a level of constriction not seen since the days of the harshest military rule.

The net effect of issuing lists and the actual killings is a systematic silencing of progressive voices. What’s more, the state, too, has been passing laws that are inimical to free speech. When young men and seasoned journalists get jailed for posting thoughts on Facebook, it is hardly a shining moment for freedom of speech. The space for freedom is rapidly reaching a level of constriction not seen since the days of the harshest military rule.

The deteriorating situation in Bangladesh increasingly presents me with an artistic dilemma too. A climate of interdictions, and worse, not only limits one’s ability to draw upon one’s natural cultural resources, but also it effectively calls on us to take up an oppositional role. I resent letting the forces of evil set the agenda of my writing. At the same time, not to respond to changes in my environment would also be forced and unnatural.

Oh what a long way we have come from the courageous and conscientious standards of men and women who went to war for our independence! What a long and tawdry length we have fallen indeed even from the spirited days of our pro-democracy movement.

Do I wish I lived in a place where I would be free, in my fictional works, to roam territories that the most violent claimants of the earth know nothing about? Perhaps that question is self-indulgent. From Ovid’s Baltic exile to Nasreen’s homelessness today, from the execution of countless heretics and dissidents across cultures and centuries, to the young bloggers hacked to death in Dhaka today, to be under serious threat has been the more common condition for writers.

we are reminded that freedom is not something we inherit.

I don’t believe that one can say vital truths only by courting the worst of known dangers. That is not the role I aspired to as a writer. That is still not the kind of role I invite with any eagerness. Yet, as the bodies pile up, and society reacts with a distinct lack of sympathy, we are reminded that freedom is not something we inherit. It is something for which we may have to fight, again and again.

About the Author

K. Anis Ahmed is the author of several works of fiction: Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, The World in My Hands and Forty Steps. He is also the publisher of the Dhaka Tribune, a national daily, and Bengal Lights, a literary journal. He lives in Dhaka, and is currently at work on a new novel, about the misadventures of extreme foodies in New York.

You can find all the essays from The Writing Life Around the World at Electric Literature.

Writing Life Around the World

The Writing Life Around the World is supported by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the New York State Council on the Arts.

CLMP-narrow
NYSCA

Ten Great Punk Songs Inspired by Books

Posted on by 007595

This summer’s release of the new Titus Andronicus record The Most Lamentable Tragedy — described as “a work of fiction” by the punk band’s singer/songwriter Patrick Stickles — in the form of a five-act, 3xLP rock opera, reminded me that punk rock has a surprisingly literary history. Stickles, who named his band after Shakespeare’s most violent play, wears his literary influences on his sleeve like no one else. He even admitted on a WTF podcast that the band name and other references came from an urge to show off all the books he read in college. Fortunately, his band’s music is far from pretentious. They’ve made some of the most fun, refreshing, and honest records to come out in recent years. On the flipside, there’s the song below from last year’s Single Mothers record, Negative Qualities, which has a line that calls out bibliophile show-offs: “At least I don’t pretend my whole life is tied together by bookends.” Bandleader Drew Thompson is just as critical of the punk scene as he is of literary types: “There’s always character archetypes,” he said in a Pitchfork interview, “and most of these songs are just about hanging out at a show and having shitty conversations with shitty people.” After hearing “Marbles,” I couldn’t help imagining these caustic remarks directed at the literary scene.

It was only a matter of time before my conception of an inter-scene battle ran its course, and I started to remember other great book-inspired songs from punk history. Some of these go beyond literary references, using ideas from books to work through basic punk rock themes of nihilism, distrust, failure, insecurity, and the evils of late capitalism, while others are a bit more light-hearted. Then there’s Iggy Pop’s Houellebecq-inspired record Preliminaires, which sounds like it came from a different planet.

Single Mothers

This Four-piece from London, Ontario formed in 2011, then went on hiatus so that the singer could pursue gold prospecting in northern Canada.

When I first heard this track, its burst of pointed anger and self-hatred reminded me of punk’s mechanism of attraction: Here’s a thing that sucks; this is what sucks about it; this is why I suck, too; and this is what makes it okay. In the case of “Marbles,” the object of derision is the McSweeney’s-hoarding, typewriter-obsessed lit poser, with whom the singer painfully admits to sharing the same crippling level of self-awareness. Or maybe he’s just pissed because his girlfriend spends more time talking with her friends about her thesis than hanging out with him.

Herzog

Weezer- and classic rock-inspired band from Cleveland with punk energy.

Given the multiple references to books and writing on this band’s record, I like to think that they named themselves after the Saul Bellow character, though they could just as easily been thinking of the filmmaker of Stroszek. Their songs have a lumpy, sad resignation that shares a strand of DNA with Bruno S., though it’s not manifested to the same abject degree. “Mad Men” could be about the alienation felt in Cleveland by average rocker dudes when comparing themselves to the characters in the Mad Men TV show; the certain failure they would face if they tried to write songs commercially for other people to sing; the belief that they could make money by moving to New York to work in publishing now that they’ve stopped trying to be writers; or all of the above. “Greet the morning with a sigh/In the city daily life/Place where dreams go to die/Watch your twenties as they slowly pass you by.”

Also see “Henchmen”: “I’d rather stay at home and read than fuck up everything some more.”

Iggy Pop

“Jim” to those who go way back with him, Iggy can also be seen again as front man in the last incarnation of The Stooges, Detroit’s most wild and visionary proto-punk band.

Iggy read Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic novel The Possibility of an Island and then went into the studio. I’m glad he did, because I’d chosen that book as an introduction to the controversial author and struggled through it, constantly getting lost in the switches from past to present and between the two clones of the protagonist, both of whom are named Daniel. Sometime after I’d finished it, I listened to Preliminaires, Iggy Pop’s adaptation of the novel in a jazz, spoken word, electro-pop, and punk format, and suddenly the book made a kind of sense. This track channels the voice of Daniel1, and it echoes Houellebecq’s central theme of hedonism, condemning it as both sickening and unavoidable. Also, here’s Iggy reading from the book in his amazing bedtime story voice: “Machine for Loving.”

Titus Andronicus

Based in Brooklyn by way of New Jersey, Titus Andronicus co-runs the DIY show space Shea Stadium with fellow punks The So So Glos.

Cleveland Bound Death Sentence

A punk rock supergroup of sorts, with Dillinger Four’s Patrick Costello on vocals. Active in the late ’90s and again in 2004 for this record.

CBDS Lyrics:

She was sitting to my surprise out on the steps when we arrived. She smiled at us (she winked at me). See life’s too short but sometimes sweet.

Paley, from “Wants”:

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

Hello, my life, I said.

The Judas Iscariot

Not to be confused with the black metal band of the same name, which was active in the same period.

He bought some vinyl for his sister Phoebe. He complained from start to finish. He was aware of our faulty educational agendas; Holden was a punk. He hated all the ‘phonies,’ but he missed them in the end. Holden Caulfield — he missed it all. Because he was like the rest of the world that eventually falls in love with what it once hated. (And what happens to the ‘punk’ with that?”)

The Mr. T. Experience

Berkeley, CA pop punk from the ’80s and ’90s.

Richard Hell

Hell was born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Kentucky, and moved to New York to become a poet after dropping out of high school.

Only time can write a song that’s really really real

The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels

And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals.

The Flesh Eaters

Founded in Los Angeles in 1977 by Chris D., who is also a poet and wrote for Slash magazine.

The Germs

Darby Crash was an unwell but well-read punk. One of the Germs’ first songs was a Nietzsche and Charles Manson-inspired mind control farce, recorded live and performed chaotically at the Roxy for the Cheech and Chong movie Up In Smoke when Crash was 19. The song wasn’t used in the film, but it became the B-side to the first single, “Forming,” and it sounds like any potentially great or terrible punk band that doesn’t know how to play yet and is wasted and doesn’t care.

I take it anywhere, any time that I can / I am the fucking son of a superman

David Varno’s writing has appeared in BOMBLog, the Brooklyn Rail, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and other publications. He is from upstate New York and lives in Brooklyn.

A Matter of Vision: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Posted on by 007595

by Zack Hatfield

Toward the end of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, our narrator describes the “slow tango” of our galaxy with the Andromeda Galaxy, their inevitable collision. After they spin past each other, she writes:

“The long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.”

Although we are not told so explicitly, the passage is to be understood as a metaphor for marriage — or at least the marriage that is explored in Groff’s novel, a both expansive and introspective realist fable of passion and compromise. Groff knows that it is at a relationship’s core where a certain darkness sleeps, one that can either reinforce or dissolve a union. Or, in the case of Lancelot and Mathilde — the two main characters of the novel — do both simultaneously.

Cradle-to-grave novels require the kind of ambitious, ambiguous specificity Groff wields. Rather than describing every year of her characters’ lives, an ensemble of scenes, moments and memories are utilized to great effect. In the first half of the book, Fates, we follow Lancelot — ironically called “Lotto” — through a thicket of traumas and life-defining moments, starting with his birth during the eye of a hurricane in Florida. A boisterous college party introduces us to Mathilde, a lanky girl whose beauty relies on a magnetic oddness. She lurks in the background during this first part, though we can sense the galaxy of her love slowly colliding with Lotto’s, all through his aspiring and failed dreams of becoming an actor, and then his victorious triumph as a New York City playwright.

Over the course of almost four hundred pages, the book whisks us through childhoods spent in Florida beaches and Pennsylvania emptiness, eventually taking us to the nineties and carrying us into present day, all while glimpsing Manhattan art galleries, operas, colleges, dim theaters, the glamorous filth of Paris. With deft vision, Groff considers grief, jealousy, parenthood, the power dynamic between spouses and the misery that accompanies art and those who make it. “Tragedy, comedy. It’s all a matter of vision,” Groff writes.

Although not obligatory, knowing some context about mythology certainly illuminates the trajectory of the novel. Take, for instance, the Fates (or Moirai) of Greek mythology — a trio of sister deities that governed a life from birth to death. At birth, Lotto lived with his father Gawain, his mother Antoinette and his aunt Susanna. These people, in many ways, steadily guide Lotto’s destiny. But his childhood friend Chollie — a gluttonous, calculating tycoon whose name bears similarity to Clotho, one of the Greek Fates — shapes Lotto’s perception just as much as anyone else. The Fates here could be a variety of people. After meeting the novel’s extravagant cast of characters, Lotto rarely appears in control of his own life. He seems to realize this too, as in this passage:

“Up before Lotto rose a vision of himself as if attached to a hundred shining strings by his fingers, eyelids, toes, the muscles of his mouth. All the strings led to Mathilde’s pointer finger, and she moved it with the subtlest of twitches and made him dance.”

On one hand, it’s hard to ignore that the author herself is the Fates, especially when Groff inserts her own asides in brackets throughout the text, a wink at the traditional Greek chorus. But this passage also foregrounds the idea of performance that’s so crucial to empathizing with Mathilde and Lotto. Aside from the actual world of New York dramaturgy Lotto becomes apart of, there is another theater Groff is intent on exploring — a theater of life. How much of someone’s identity is simply acting? Why do we fall into complacency in our roles? To emphasize these questions, the novel’s dramas are presented in a structure that mirrors that of theater. Groff’s scenes make temporal jumps that continuously renew intrigue during reading, and occasionally sections are presented in dialogue or include pieces of scripts that Lotto has written. These choices help stage the actions in equal light, and afford glimpses of the production inside Lotto’s mind.

As the axis on which Lotto’s “version” rotates is fate, the axis of Mathilde’s spins on Fury. The Furies in mythology are comprised of three goddesses who punish, among others, those who have harmed family members. It’s in this section where we learn that Mathilde too has faced her own share of scarring incidents, beginning with her unfortunate upbringing. In Groff’s modern fairy tale, she is a kind of Cinderella; after she meets Lancelot, her cheery, borderline alcoholic, Shakespeare-quoting prince, it’s hard to tell whether his presence is a curse or a salvation. As an artist he is granted fame that, while earned, partly belongs to his wife. He wants a child from a woman who does not want to bring one into the world. A foil against Lotto’s childlike innocence, Mathilde herself possesses a fury that is regularly stoked until their marriage becomes refined by fire.

A fascination with myth isn’t new to Groff, whose two earlier novels explored characters in similar ways. In her latest novel, mythic references reveal the parallels between myth and marriage: their grandiosities, their tracings of something from their inception to their memorable conclusion, their abiding lies and half-truths that inevitably turn into gospel. On the surface, Groff’s prose sparkles, but it also pulls the reader into a thick undertow of doubt and loss. Just like the surface of their marriage: a pristine shimmer that trembles from the deeper problems beneath.

Perched precariously atop the vertex of helplessness is a position Groff frequently puts her characters. In her marvelous short story “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” her protagonist is left adrift in a canoe in a marsh full of alligators. In Fates and Furies, an electricity shortage proves life threatening to Lotto during a writer’s winter retreat in a cabin. These dangerous situations form hinges in Groff’s stories, able to open deeper revelations within the character and the book. Sometimes they work, as in the short story. At certain instances in Fates and Furies, they can feel a tad too much like devices (then again, Groff seems to have no qualms letting the strings of her literary puppetry show). In addition to this, a minefield of secrets is perfectly set up to detonate when we least expect them, lending the novel the touch of a potboiler. While winning the hearts of beach readers and Midwestern book clubs, this always risks placing surprise over meaning. In the novel’s attempt at emotional complexity, its secrets and arguments just barely evade what is perhaps the most vexed literary crime — excessive melodrama.

What rescues Fates and Furies are Groff’s sentences, as always lithe and poetic, unrolling like a glimmering carpet to the gray and uncertain territory of her characters’ inner conflicts. She wields an almost-wizardly command of language, specifically metaphor. Each page contains sumptuous pieces of imagery. “A tiger of light” prowls in a bedroom in the morning. Tree branches are “stunned as soldiers after an ambush.” Mathilde’s blood is “humming like a beehive.” A memorable description opens one of the last chapters: “Mathilde had always been a fist, in truth. Only with Lotto had she been an open hand.” Fates and Furies, too, begins as a fist, its secrets clenched in its grasp. Once it is pried open, the secrets release like a magician’s doves. The hand is empty, and there is nothing left to offer.

Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

Powells.com

They Are Living Their Own Myths: An Interview With N.K. Jemisin, Author Of The Fifth Season

Posted on by 007595

N.K. Jemisin’s fiction unfolds in unexpected ways, and her latest novel, The Fifth Season, displays this on multiple levels. It’s the first book in a trilogy, The Broken Earth. That title can be taken literally: it’s set in a world in which the ruins of former civilizations and empires provide the backdrop and, in some cases, literally loom over the action. Essun, the novel’s central character, goes in search of her missing daughter. She is also, the reader quickly learns, able to manipulate seismic energy, an ability that has also left its impact on her world. Did I mention that it’s also one of the most impressively-structured books I’ve read in a long while? Over the course of the novel, three distinct plotlines manifest themselves, and the elegance with which they converge is impressive to behold.

Jemisin’s previous work includes The Inheritance Trilogy and the two books that make up The Dreamblood. Her books blend moral complexity, worldbuilding on a grand scale, and characters who are forced to make impossible decisions. All of these subjects came up in a conversation that we conducted over the phone. An edited version of our conversation follows.

TC: In the acknowledgements of The Fifth Season, you mentioned that the book had its roots in a NASA program at which you’d had a residency. Was there any part of the book that predated that?

NKJ: It’s hard to answer that question. Pretty much nothing that I come up with is that individual, for lack of a better description. Pieces of ideas come from things that I do and they may gel together years later to become something useful. That’s what happened in this case. The NASA thing helped, and probably was one of the pieces that helped me understand the environmental aspect, the worldbuilding. The story didn’t come together until much later, when I had a character that popped into my head; that was from a dream.

TC: In the author Q & A that appeared in The Dreamblood, you talked about what the planetary structure was. I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, but had never really considered the planetary nature of what were, essentially, fantasy worlds. How much of that needs to be done before you can start working on a project?

NKJ: A lot of it, I put together as I’m working on it. Ultimately, for me, I’m a character-focused writer. The worldbuilding is something that interests me, of course, but the thing that makes it start for me is having a character. The worldbuilding informs the characters. Looking at the mechanics and dynamics–for example, with The Dreamblood, the first thing that pops into my head was a character creeping into someone’s room in the dead of night to kill them for a religious purpose. I had no idea what the religious purpose was; I had no idea what the religion was. I just knew that I wanted a vaguely Egypt-like society and killer ninja priests.

Then I tried to think about what the religion would look like, and I was contemplating that there would be this giant, weird-looking moon in the sky. That created a lot of the symbology and the magic system, because whatever people are exposed to is what they tend to shape their ideologies and philosophies and so forth around. That’s my own belief; it’s what we see in the real world. It’s how I tend to do things. I don’t know how to tell you how I do it beyond that.

TC: You’ve written one trilogy and–would “duology” be the correct term for The Dreamblood books?

It was, maybe, ten years ago, but it was in the days when people believed that black people didn’t read, and that a book containing primarily black characters wouldn’t sell.

NKJ: Kind of, yeah. With The Dreamblood, I intended to make a trilogy. The Dreamblood books were my first publishable book. They’re what got me my agent, but they did not get published at first. They made the rounds of the houses in New York, but for whatever reason–actually, they told me… I have some feelings about those reasons. In a couple of cases, they told me that they didn’t know what the audience for that would be. It was, maybe, ten years ago, but it was in the days when people believed that black people didn’t read, and that a book containing primarily black characters wouldn’t sell. So I put those aside and I worked on The Inheritance Trilogy. By the time I got back to The Dreamblood, and by the time I was established enough to sell it, I had fallen out of love with the series. I didn’t feel like I could do a third book, so that’s why it became a duology.

TC: Do you have a sense of where events will fall when plotting over multiple books?

NKJ: It really varies, depending on the project. For The Inheritance Trilogy, because I was disillusioned at that point, I decided to write is a standalone. But as I was writing it, it occurred to me that the resolution of the first book was not really the resolution of the overarching issue. I fixed one problem, but there was a much bigger project that needed to be resolved, and I knew that I could write a second and third book. I made the first book standalone and ready to go and gave that book to my agent to try to sell, and I told her that I was willing to write books two and three. Somewhere along the way, the publishers that were interested kept asking, “Can you write another one? Can you write three?” And then it was a trilogy. It was not an intentional thing. I have vague ideas when I outline. Sometime I forget that I have an outline and then I pants it for a while and belatedly remember that I was supposed to be doing a particular plot and try to fix it and it goes all over the place. It depends on the project.

TC: Did you know from the outset that your current project would encompass more than one book?

NKJ: I knew that in this case, I set out to do something that I had never done before. Well, several things that I had never done before. In particular, I wanted to follow the same person through a fairly long saga. I’d been writing epic fantasy that I think of as inspired by actual epics–i.e. the epic form from Gilgamesh, and so on. Those are usually essentially serial tales, although they’re not necessarily told in order. Successive tales of particular heroes going through various trials and so forth. In the case of The Inheritance Trilogy, I decided to do that with the gods as the focus of the story, and following particular characters as they interact with them. The only point that remains throughout all three books is the pantheon.

With The Dreamblood, the focus was the city. The only singular point that would have remained through all three books was the fate of the city, and all of the different things that happened to it. With this, I want to follow a singular person through, essentially, the labors of Hercules. Over the course of the trilogy, she has to fix something on a literally global scale. And that will ultimately be what she has to do in order to achieve that personal resolution. Because I knew that I was going to follow the same person through a lot of trials and tribulations, I knew that was going to be more than one book. I wasn’t sure how many, but it’s easy to sell a trilogy, so I went with the trilogy.

TC: One of the joys of reading The Fifth Season was the way it was structured, and seeing the ways that the different subplots came together. They’re told in different ways, including in the third and second person. How did you end up deciding to structure it in this particular way?

NKJ: I read pretty widely, not just fantasy, so I don’t feel particularly wedded to the genre conventions. Fortunately, my publisher has been supportive in letting me explore, and my readers have been supportive in buying those books, so that I can continue to explore. I think that’s because the fantasy audience is not just interested in formula, as I think a lot of popular wisdom would have people believe. The experimental stuff that I have done is not that different from what a lot of the great and enduring novels in the genre have done, and things that end up changing the genre have done. I don’t think of it as being particularly unusual.

The second-person piece? I don’t know where that came from. I often write test chapters when I’m first starting the novel, when I’m playing with the character and trying to figure out what her voice or his voice is going to be. I wrote a test chapter in the second person on a whim and it worked, and I decided to keep doing it. There’s no explanation beyond that. I was really interested, because second person generally doesn’t sell too well, and a lot of readers are sort of hinky about it, so I guess we’ll see.

TC: We get a sense of some of the communities and internal politics of the Stillness over the course of The Fifth Season. Did that generally come up as you were writing it, or was there a reference that you had figured out ahead of time?

NKJ: Both. The necessity of keeping track of the various little bits of culture and world and so forth–I’ve experimented with using a personal wiki and things like that before. In this case, I just wrote a crap-ton of notes. I have a list of all the Seasons. I have a list of glossary terms that became the glossary. I always have to keep track of the various made-up words that I use. I made a map. I am not a map girl. I do not like maps. I’m apparently infamous within the genre for being bizarrely hateful on maps, but I finally had to make a map. I had to know what the geography would look like, and I needed to know what the fault lines were and things like that.

I wanted to show a society that was shaped by its environment and that was shaped by the disasters that had preceded it.

As I was working on these things, the rest of the world just started to gel. It was kind of necessary, because I needed a societal structure within which these things would happen. And the societal structure needed to show all that history that I had built in. I wanted to show a society that was shaped by its environment and that was shaped by the disasters that had preceded it. All of that came out of me thinking, “This is a society that periodically loses power, loses water, and where it’s very difficult to maintain central control.” This society would not be top-down authoritarian, except on a superficial level. Local control would be crucial. They would have structures in place to cause each community to close within itself and become its own enclosed, self-supporting world for a while.

So all of that went into figuring out how the society worked. They abandon capitalism during the Season, because they know that that is a danger. It’s a great way to end up with part of your population starving, and the community doesn’t have enough people to survive and to eat, and then you die. So they turn kind of hard-core communist for a brief period of time, or authoritarian, totalitarian, for a period of time. The flexibility of the society is something that I had to put together. And the rigidity of it was also there. It needed to be visible, too. I just played around with it.

TC: The structure of different characters’ names was also interesting — the way that the significance of them became apparent over the course of the novel.

You forget that it’s magic; it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a balancing line.

NKJ: That’s standard fantasy genre stuff. Worldbuilding is a central tenet within any secondary world fantasy, and a certain subset of science fiction, too. The readership expects and demands that level of detail. There are people who will make role-playing games in a heartbeat out of your books, and if you have not provided them with predictable structures and things like that, they are going to get really pissed at you. And that can be helpful, because it makes you drill down to a level of verisimilitude that most people don’t want to think about; that can create a world with a really great lived-in feel, if you do it right. Of course, it can also be a crutch, because you’re still obsessed with creating mechanistic magic systems, which is almost an oxymoron, that can be played as a Dungeons & Dragons game. You forget that it’s magic; it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a balancing line.

TC: The fact that the manipulation of fault lines in the novel also involves lowering the temperature, because of how energy is involved, struck me as a very interesting and resonant detail.

They are living their own myths. This is The Iliad that they’re going through…

NKJ: The idea was that I wasn’t going to use the word “magic.” Why would they call it that? Why would they treat it as something different from the way that their world works? It’s the laws of physics there. It’s science for them, so they use scientific terminology. They quantify to whatever degree they can. They treat it mechanistically. They train mechanistically. They do everything they can to systematize it. It’s not systematizable, and they recognize that past a certain point, but that won’t stop them from continuing to try to explore it and understand it, any more than not understanding how the universe was created has stopped us from trying to figure out the age of that star over there, and that sort of thing. In this case, I’m doing a secondary world whose people don’t need to emulate myths; they are creating their own. They are living their own myths. This is The Iliad that they’re going through, and then some stuff. That’s what I was trying to come up with: for the people who are living through the impossible, it isn’t impossible, because they’re living through it. I wanted it to feel like that.

TC: As you were coming up with the world’s culture and history, were there other stories that you realized that you could tell in this world if you wanted to, or that you may tell down the line?

NKJ: I’m only about halfway through it now. I’m just about done with the second book. Right now, I’m so closely focused on Essun’s story that I don’t have any others in my head. I did play around with one; I wrote a short story called “Stone Hunger” that came out in Clarkesworld about a year ago. That was a story that I did to test out the concepts of the world and to test out different characters. It’s not related to the trilogy, but it’s set in the same world. There are a couple of characters in it who have the same names, but they’re not the same people. I can tell lots of stories in the world, but no one else’s story is calling to me right now. This is going to remain a character-focused world; it’s just a question of who I want to explore. I might want to go into Alabaster a little bit, but that depends on what I end up doing with him. Stuff happens in book two.

TC: You had mentioned your reading habits earlier. Do you find that they change with you’re in the middle of writing something?

NKJ: While I’m writing something, I often stop reading for exploration or learning. When I’m reading for learning, I read a lot of nonfiction. I’ll deliberately choose stuff outside my comfort zone so that I can learn new techniques. When I am writing stuff, especially this trilogy, which is emotionally draining, I need stress relief. I read junk. On purpose. I don’t want to name the junk, because I don’t want to embarrass the authors, but–I find the crappiest schlock, and I read it. Or I find comfort fiction. I go for stuff that I know is well-written because I’ve read it before, and I read it again. My reading habits have devolved, but they’re also helping me stay on track. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

TC: Over the course of this book, Essun has to make some incredibly horrific decisions, and is capable of doing horrific things to people. How do you balance making her relatable, while still making her a complex figure?

We’re dealing with a literary landscape in which women have to be likable to be popular. But I’m not necessarily going for popular.

NKJ: I don’t know yet. My hope is that, because I’m exploring her in full, I’m delving as deeply as possible into her. You’re seeing why she makes these horrific decisions. For me, that’s always been a thing that helps. We’re dealing with a literary landscape in which women have to be likable to be popular. But I’m not necessarily going for popular. I’m going for “keep my career alive.” I don’t need to be a bestseller. I’d like to be, but I don’t need to be. I know that, in a lot of cases, women characters are expected to be nice, or to be likable, and I know that I’m not going to be able to keep Essun likable, because she’s not in a likable situation, and she’s got to make horrible choices, as you said. So all I can do is show that there are reasons for those choices, and that those choices take a toll. She’s not doing it out of callousness or cruelty, she’s doing it because she’s backed into a literal corner in some cases. And that is taken, in some cases, from real-world events.

TC: Do you generally need to take a break after writing something that harrowing?

NKJ: Yeah. I took a break after the first book and wrote some short stories that were completely different. I wrote a novella, actually, The Awakened Kingdom, which was in the Inheritance Trilogy universe. It’s fluffy, silly, cutesy stuff, literally from the point of view of a five-year-old. I needed to write that to cleanse mental palate and do some catharsis. This whole trilogy is having that kind of effect on me. It’s been harder going than I was expecting it to be, which is one of the reasons that Orbit delayed publication of the first book. It was originally supposed to come out in August, 2014. I got it done on time, but I needed that break. I went to my editor and said, “Look, I can’t jump into book two now,” and she understood. I took some time, and I wrote some happy stuff, and I was able to get back into it.

TC: Do you have a sense of what you might be working on after the second book is done? Will there be another break in there?

NKJ: I don’t know if I’ll need as much of a break this time. The world is established; the second book is coming more easily than the first one did. Horrific things are still happening, but I think I’ve just acclimated to it by now, which is scary. I don’t have plans to take a break at this time. I plan to jump right into book three this time, and try to finish it quickly. I do have another idea for another novel in mind, possibly a YA story, and I want to get to that. I’m feeling rushed by my own imagination right now. The idea is more fun, and definitely lighter. Although it’s kind of Lovecraftian, so it’s kind of hilarious that I find Lovecraft lighter than what I’ve been writing. It’s only elder gods; it’s fine.

“Jenny is toothless, eyeless, and hairless.” — Read Three Sonnets by Tiffany Midge

Posted on by 007595

POETRY: Three Sonnets

Sixth Street House Sonnet #1

Jenny is toothless, eyeless, and hairless.
She spits puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh,
like a snare drum, a cough, choke fit, a mess.
She’s small, barely four feet tall and she loves
us all except when she doesn’t. At meals,
applesauce orbits her mouth, Jenny’s hands
astound, she sculpts food into mushy balls,
then climbs and spiders the halls, rubberbands
from one lap to next, extorts wet kisses
from staff. Jenny’s a woman with the mind
of a babe, she seizes, she smacks, misses
nothing, lives in a shroud among her kind:
Cindy’s radio and Jane’s dementia,
all surrounded by vivid absentia.

Sixth Street House Sonnet #2

Jenny’s blind, Lara’s deaf, perfect roomies, one
burns the lights all night and the other sings
along to her radio, claps her hands
to Thriller and sometimes Celine Dion.

Their room looks like what I would imagine
they might imagine their insides to be,
like the cavities of Teddy bears, see
pink, see plush, see clowns waiting to happen —

whirling and wild carnivals with rainbow
unicorns and cupcakes to eat all day
long! Lara scoops her hands into tableau
glass beads, reds/blues/greens prismed like oil splay

in a puddle, the hard jewels of them skip
and tap along to strange, funhouse music.

Sixth Street House Sonnet #3

The women are mostly tiny, like dolls,
a blessing for their caretakers who rack
them into their wheelchairs to cruise the mall’s
artificial light and droning muzak,

which I’d name Hymns for the Inheritors
of the Earth and for every milestone gained — 
less tantrums, less seizures, improved motor
skills, spoon holding, self fed, self toilet trained —

put a gold star on the chart and give praise,
praise, praise! Jenny’s nixed her Depends, Cindy
quit stripping down at Winco’s Grocery,
Anne swapped helmet for a gait harness. Pray

for the meek, for each small triumph they reap.
Modest earthlings, little birds beyond sweet.

Garbage Collector Rescues Discarded Books for Children

Posted on by 007595

Of the 19 public libraries in Bogotá, Colombia, all are located far from the poorer regions of the city, thus restricting many people’s access to books.

Thankfully, 53-year-old garbage collector Jose Gutierrez is working hard to ensure that children everywhere are exposed to the joy of reading. As ABC News reports, Gutierrez began “rescuing books from the trash almost 20 years ago, when he was driving a garbage truck at night through the capital’s wealthier neighborhoods.” Due to the shockingly large number of abandoned books, Gutierrez was able to create a “makeshift community library stacked…with some 20,000 books” in his own home.

Gutierrez champions the power of books, regarding them as “luxuries” for children in poverty-stricken areas. He recalls how his mother, despite being unable to keep him in school past the second grade, still endeavored to read him stories every night during his childhood. Gutierrez therefore refers to books as our “salvation,” which I certainly can’t disagree with. His favorite books include One Hundred Years of Solitude and The General in his Labyrinth, written by fellow Colombian and Nobel-Prize winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez.

Gutierrez is known as “Lord of the Books” in Colombia, and due to his fame he frequently receives book donations. I can’t help but wish we had an American equivalent of “Lord of the Books,” especially considering the existence of its antithesis: the “Literary Litterbug,” a Colorado man recently found guilty for tossing unwanted books out of his vehicle. Gutierrez could have undoubtedly offered those novels a home in his library. If only!

Sometimes a Dirty Photo Is Also Photographing Love: a Dispatch from the Kinsey Institute Library

Posted on by 007595

by Ander Monson

Ander Monson’s interest in libraries extends beyond books to the human ephemera found in archives — evidence of previous readers and researchers and archivists among the actual holdings themselves. In July, he visited the world-renowned Kinsey Institute’s library in Bloomington, IN as a Coffee House Press In The Stacks writer-in-residence, continuing his exploration of the physical relationship between a reader and a book in an archive that includes not only the papers of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, but also books, print materials, film and video, fine art, artifacts, and photography related to human investigations of sexual behavior, gender, and reproduction. You can read an interview between Monson and librarians from the Kinsey Institute Library here. Below is part one of a two part dispatch from his residency.

The First Love Picture

love photo

— Anonymous Photo Albums KI-AA:87 and 88 (Kinsey Institute Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

It’s a rush to follow this love’s course photographically from 1934 to 1953: courtship to foreplay to marriage to sex to baby to sex to tenth anniversary to sex to yet more sex and then beyond. These two amateur photo albums picture Peg & Bob, mostly on their own, mostly nude, and in equal measure, but with plenty together in sexual positions that you know by now from life or porn. They both seem to enjoy the naked posing game. The books and the cameras used are Bob’s. That’s his hand above; he narrates and curates both volumes, though Peg’s handwriting shows up halfway through volume 2. It’s Bob’s version of the story that is preserved, but who’s he speaking to? His later self? Their daughter Juniper? To memory? Since by now he’s gone, he speaks to me, if unintentionally.

I don’t know why their story ends suddenly with 56 pages remaining in the second book. The last full spread shows a naked Peg, annotated thus: “This is the way that she looked on September 9, 1952. What a wild time she had, and a fun time. It excites me a lot to look at this picture and think the thoughts that go with it.” Then we turn the page and see just frames without their photographs. One is captioned “my lover.” The next is captionless. The third: “Mr. D says, ‘Come and get me’” (you may guess that “Mr. D” is Bob’s nickname for his dick), but no photograph. Then two Polaroids dated August 1953, but they’re stuck together, face to face, and though by this time I badly want to know I won’t dare tear what has been so fused asunder.

Instead I check the back: it reads 037253. If I lift the flap I can barely see that one is a shot of a naked Peg, but how much she shows I cannot tell. By now we’ve seen it all. We know her body well — and his: the rhythm of the book suggests the facing photo is a naked Bob. Four assorted Polaroids come after, unmounted and unordered, none as interesting or technically accomplished as the ones before, then: blank page, blank page, blank page, blank page, blank, repeat.

So I hypothesize: Cancer took her shortly after. Or divorce. He strayed. Or she did, though she stayed. She tired of games and refused to pose. He got bored and petulant. One or both was disfigured in an accident and no longer wanted to be photographed, uncomfortable as they were with being seen as something less than what they were before. Or their lives became too full for things like this. Their love just ended or could no longer be contained in a picture. Or or or or or.

Every object has a story. Naked amateurs especially. Decades later Bob donated these books anonymously to the Kinsey, a librarian tells me (she recognized him later in another context and asked just to confirm). What might this have meant for him? Sure, anonymous thousands volunteered their sexual histories for Kinsey’s studies, and quite a few wrote to him afterward to amend the record, add more sexual encounters, admit to those they overlooked or made up and wanted to be sure were counted in the weeks or years after their initial interviews. Kinsey got his share of letters from the obsessives and the cranks (a red sticker denotes these in his correspondence) or those in search of a confessor, a professor, a colleague, or a lover. But for Bob to offer up something so obviously a love labor, intimate and individual, to the collection tells me something else. Was his donation like a publication? Did its accession validate the work? In being so collected and cataloged does it become art?

At the least it’s evidence. All libraries are filled with it, but the Kinsey’s something special: secrets and taboo and anonymity amplify the stakes. Sometimes when we make a dirty photo — not always, perhaps not even often — we are also photographing love. It’s this love I leave here with: a naked Peg fused face-to-face to a naked Bob, facing only each other, even if by accident. Of all these instances this is their only truly private joining.

Maybe it’s enough to know they’re here together, and that the Kinsey Library will keep them that way forever.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: THE LETTER A

Posted on by 007595

★★★★☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the letter A.

As the first letter of the alphabet, A is undoubtedly the most famous. Unfortunately, it suffers from being the most overused. And there is mounting evidence that it may be reaching saturation point. According to a recent survey I personally conducted, 63% of my neighbors couldn’t even tell there was an A missing when I showed them a notecard with the word ‘ardvark’ [sic] on it.

What does this mean for the future of A? My guess is people don’t find it that necessary and it will eventually become obsolete. Not everyone will be okay with this. Some will cling to it, the way some people cling to the original definition of ‘literally’.

If A does become obsolete, the baseball team the A’s will have to change their name or risk being an anachronism that young fans can’t understand. Like the Baltimore Orioles. When’s the last time you saw an oriole? I haven’t seen one in decades. They are probably extinct. Maybe I’ll ask out a bird-watcher and see what she says. If you know any attractive lady bird-watchers who are single or in an open relationship, please pass along my number: (617) 379–2576.

Anyway, I’d much rather see one of the novelty letters go, like Q or H. A will always remain a classic as far as I’m concerned. It’s bold and strong and looks like a V that is standing up. A can also be its own word. Name one other letter that can do that. Name even just half a letter that can do that. There aren’t any!

A lot of books are going to need to be reprinted when A is gone. Literally all the books will need to be reprinted. Unless there is a book out there that was written by someone with a broken A key on their typewriter. Anyway, when that time comes, the publishing industry is going to clean up. That’s why I recommend everyone invest in books very soon.

BEST FEATURE: It reminds me of the Eiffel Tower, which I saw on a postcard once and it looked quite pretty.
WORST FEATURE: It’s too pointy. If I fell out of a helicopter onto a three-dimensional ‘SALE’ sign, I would hope to land on any letter other than the A.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing The Fall Guy.

Handwritten James Joyce Letters Sold in Auction

Posted on by 007595

In a day and age when any handwritten letter is practically vintage, two of James Joyce’s rare correspondences have managed to sell for more than ten times their guide price. The minimum bid at the RR Auction in Boston was $2,500, but Joyce’s letters sold for a whopping $24,650.

According to The Guardian, the first letter’s recipient is an “Irish admirer” who praised Ulysses. It’s dated November 1st, 1918, and while first thanking his admirer, Joyce primarily outlines his difficulty finding printers willing to publish installments of the novel. Fearing more “obscenity” charges, specifically related to the Nausicaa Episode, no UK publisher released Ulysses until 1936.

A complete edition of Ulysses, however, was published in Paris in 1922; Joyce’s biographer Gordon Bowker explains that “British writers found it easier to publish in France where English obscenities were either overlooked or just not understood.” Paris in the early twentieth century was a rollicking, liberating time for writers of many nationalities, including Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and of course James Joyce.

In Joyce’s second letter, dated June 1st, 1919, he seems to be similarly troubled. Mark Traynor, managing director of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, acknowledges that the value of these letters had much to do with being written during a “fascinating period” in Joyce’s writing career, when he “was under considerable stress both financially and in terms of his health, all the while writing a book that appeared to have all the odds stacked against it.”

One might fantasize that the letters are actually streaked with Joyce’s ancient blood, sweat, and tears. (Why else would it sell for so much money? Just a thought…) If letters written during periods of “considerable stress” are most valuable nowadays, then perhaps our contemporary college students should consider writing detailed, anguished handwritten letters about their attempts to read Ulysses — and subsequently, their attempts to write articulate essays about the novel for their literature courses. Think of the profits!

The Extent of Loneliness: Lolito by Ben Brooks

Posted on by 007595

I once spent the night with a girl I met online. I was twenty-five at the time and had recently moved to a Vermont town so small it didn’t even qualify as a town — officially, it was a village. I worked the graveyard shift at a motel, and most of my nights were spent clicking through Facebook profiles of single women who lived within a hundred mile radius. I’ll admit, I felt a little creepy sitting there at two in the morning, the light from the front desk’s computer casting a blue, almost Lynchian light into the otherwise dark lobby, but my romantic options were limited. The women who frequented the one bar in town only flashed their tic-tac-shaped teeth at beefy locals, and the scene down at the food co-op often resembled a mixer at a nursing home, complete with free cups of organic prune juice and A Prairie Home Companion playing over the loudspeaker. So when I began exchanging suggestive messages with a woman from Jericho, I didn’t feel sad or pathetic or creepy; in fact, our cyber flirtation seemed perfectly reasonable, a mutually beneficial relief from our respective geographical, and emotional, isolation. And when, a few weeks later, we agreed to meet at a bar in Montpelier, the mere thought that, come Friday, another human would be waiting in a corner booth made me feel a little less alone.

The need to feel less alone is what drives Etgar, the fifteen year-old narrator of Ben Brooks’s Lolito, into the arms of Macy, a forty-six year-old teacher. The novel takes place over the Easter holidays — the British equivalent of spring break — while Etgar’s parents are in Russia to attend the wedding of his uncle to a woman whom he “found” on the internet. Thus, Etgar is left home alone, along with his dog, Amundsen, to drink his parents’ liquor, mourn the betrayal of his girlfriend, Alice (she gave a handjob to another boy from their class), and watch Titanic while wearing his friend Hattie’s panda suit. If this all sounds like an episode of the British TV show Skins, well, you wouldn’t be wrong. Both rely on the affect of grittiness for their appeal while simultaneously featuring teenagers who are as fragile as a Morrissey song. For example, early in the novel Etgar and Alice chat online about a snuff film they are both watching, a film in which one man is beheaded with a chainsaw and another with a bowie knife. The bowie knife, Etgar observes, “takes longer and involves less fireworks.” Later, after Etgar uncovers evidence of Alice’s handjobbing, he takes Amundsen for a walk and confesses, “Leaving the house is scary. I’m worried the sky will get too heavy and I’ll fall over.” What this disparity — the clear-eyed acceptance of real-life violence and the inability to endure a little heartbreak — really illustrates is immaturity.

A real, grownup trauma does happen to Etgar in the form of Macy, whom he meets in a chat room one hung-over morning. They exchange pics — Etgar wearing one of his dad’s suits, Macy with her “amazing nipples showing through the t-shirt” — and by the next day they are engaged in cringe-inducing cybersex. From the beginning, it beggars belief that Macy actually thinks Etgar is of legal age — during a voice chat, Etgar pronounces cabernet sauvignon “cab-er-net soh-vig-non” even though he claims to work as a mortgage broker — but Etgar is convinced that he has successfully pulled off the con. Two days later, Etgar is on a train to London, where he has booked a hotel room using money he inherited from his gran. If the novel has one central failing, it is that this trip occurs more than halfway through the book. Too much time is spent in a rinse-and-repeat cycle of Etgar waking up, drinking, watching a movie, feeling things, falling asleep, getting drunk with friends, watching another movie, feeling more things, and then falling asleep again. In contrast, the aftermath of the tryst is dealt with in two-dozen pages, though this is not exactly surprising — the novel, like most novels written by and for young adults (Brooks is twenty-three), flinches at drama and is more concerned with melodrama. The narrative voice itself is infused with this melodrama, and one of its more annoying tics is to constantly tell the reader how Etgar feels.

If the reader harbored any doubts about whether or not Macy is aware of Etgar’s true age, they are dispelled when she remarks, post-coitus, “You’re young.” And when she asks how young, we are told, “she doesn’t sound angry. She sounds curious and far away.” Etgar lies and says he’s eighteen, thereby granting legality to the proceedings. Macy then confesses she is a teacher with a husband and kids. This revelation doesn’t cause Etgar to immediately catch the next train home; in fact, all the honesty in the room seems to calms him, and for the first time in book he is free of all the acting and pretense that characterize adolescence. The most affecting, and disturbing, scene in the book occurs the following day, when Etgar and Macy take turns punching each other in the stomach (while they are both topless), and then they go and get tattoos of the outlines of the bruises. As Etgar correctly observes, “My skin will stretch and shed, but the edge of this bruise will stay the same.”

My internet tryst left also left a permanent mark, though of a different sort. Unlike Etgar, I woke up the next day to discover that my loneliness had only been replaced by other, more adult emotions — disappointment and regret. I remember lying in bed, trying to piece together the events of the previous night — driving to Waterbury for more drinks before heading north for a cheap, off-season motel in Stowe — and then rolling over to find a woman who looked even more miserable than me. Over breakfast, we both offered half-hearted suggestions about how to spend such a beautiful autumn Saturday, but afterwards we went to a farmer’s market, and there we both quickly realized that we were buying ingredients for two separate meals. We paid for our produce, exchanged an awkward hug, and then parted ways. On the bus ride home — I didn’t own a car and had taken a Greyhound to our date — I put on my headphones and waited for the loneliness to return. It didn’t, and it still hasn’t, though somtimes I wish it would.

Lolito

by Ben Brooks

Powells.com