Mirror Nation

Don Mee Choi’s newest book of poetry Mirror Nation opens on a bridge in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. The last spy swap between East and West Berlin is taking place on the Bridge of Spies, and Choi is watching her father, a photojournalist, move around the bridge photographing the event. He’s easy to spot because he’s wearing a white winter hat with its ear flaps down.

Mirror Nation is replete with bridges. There’s the Eisener Steg, a footbridge that crosses the Main River in Frankfurt, where Choi lived in the 1980s. There’s the Langenscheidtbrücke in Berlin, which features prominently in Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire. There’s the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which I just mentioned. In Korea, there are the Taedong Bridge in Pyongyang and the Hangang Bridge in Seoul. Choi lived near the latter and used to walk on it as a child. What she tells us at the outset of this book is that certain symbols, like these bridges or the Mercedes Benz advertising logo that she sees from her apartment window in Berlin, along with certain hours on the clock, can send her memory tumbling back in time. “Sometimes, the flow of time is reversed for no apparent reason,” and memories of grief return.

Written while living in Berlin (once a divided city, just as her native Korea remains a divided country), the main event of this book is the May 1980 Gwangju Massacre (as she calls it) or Uprising, when hundreds, if not thousands of students and civilians were killed by Korean soldiers after the newly-installed South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan implemented martial law (with the full backing of the U.S. government). Thousands more were arrested and tortured. This event is threaded amongst moments plucked from Choi’s autobiography along with some free-form writing on a handful of topics like memory, angels, and time. Mirror Nation is the concluding volume of her trilogy of books that use both poetry and prose written in English and Korean, along with a somewhat adventurous use of type fonts, photographs, and other types of imagery. Collectively, the trilogy addresses Korean history during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, racism, and the legacy of the Korean War and subsequent American involvement in Korea. These books are part autobiography, part activism, and part “disobeying history,” as she says in Hardly War. In Seattle’s Wave Books, she’s found a publisher that gives her the design freedom to present her hybrid form of text/image to its best advantage.

Choi’s father, a photojournalist, photographed and filmed events throughout the days of the Gwangju Uprising and Choi herself turned eighteen only months afterward. Eventually, the family emigrated, splitting up between Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United States. Years later, her father related to her at length the frightening days he spent dodging soldiers as he photographed the clashes between protesters and government troops, documenting the dead and wounded. Several of his photographs are reproduced in the book, including a powerful sequence of full-page images. Also included in the book are several once-secret U.S. government documents demonstrating how American diplomats blamed Korean students for the protests and urged the Korean government to use violent force to put down the uprising.

Choi began this trilogy in 2016 with Hardly War, a bravura example of poetry and visual performance that more or less focused on the Korean War, although Choi’s books are never about just one thing. In 2018, DMZ Colony won the National Book Award. Its central theme was the succession of corrupt South Korean governments and the violence they have perpetrated on their own people, both before and after the Korean War. “How does this happen?” she asks. After Korea had been colonized by Japan and “neo-colonized by the US military machine,” it was easy. All the Korean regime needed was language to turn protesters into enemies of the state. “Not difficult to see each other as ‘scums of society,’ ‘commies.'”

Throughout the new book, Choi pays homage to other writers and artists who have influenced her work and Mirror Nation in particular. She quotes W.G. Sebald on “the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries” (Vertigo). There are references to Fritz Fanon, for his writings on post-colonialism, and to W.E.B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., who studied in Berlin in the 1890s. Walter Benjamin is invoked, of course, since Choi clearly abides by his belief of involuntary memories. But the presiding figures that hover over this book are the angels from Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire, his love letter to Berlin and to the angels that watch over that city.

Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire

After three books of war, incredible violence, and a family scattered across the globe, Choi, at the end of Mirror Nation, understands that she, too, is a divided country, a political person and a family person, one person who is consumed with history and grief and another person who stops to marvel at sparrows and swans. “While filming wars,” “[my father] said my sister and I often flashed before his eyes/we were a panorama of sparrows under Mother’s umbrella.”

Choi’s politically engaged, plurilingual, autobiographical, illustrated, and typographically bold trilogy is the worthy successor to her fellow countrywomen Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s now classic book Dictee (1982), which is frequently called a “masterpiece” by reviewers. In terms of their construction, Choi’s books are more complex than Dictee. Reading Choi’s trilogy is like watching a juggler tossing up a plate and an apple and several other odd objects, one of which is a very sharp knife, as our emotions shift from horror to tension to laughter. She can take the reader from anger to childlike silliness over the course of a page or two. Like Dictee, each of Choi’s three books are meant to be considered as a whole, not as a collection of individual poems. This lets her set up a body of references that continually bounce off of each other throughout each volume and throughout the trilogy, giving the reader the kind of complexity and depth that is often only found in novels.

Choi seems to need to use a wide range of modes—to write in poetry and in paragraphs, to write in English and in Korean, to use images. Hardly War even includes a short play, complete with chorus. I think this is how she lets her divided self, her multi-sided-self, speak—her partisan self, her angry and persistent historian self, her family self, and the part of her that is still childlike. In this powerful and moving trilogy, she has turned a poetic mirror not only on Korea, but also on herself.

“So much to regret”: Gabriel Josipovici’s “The Cemetery at Barnes”

“Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the uncanny resemblance between his two wives.”

Cracking open Gabriel Josipovici’s novel The Cemetery in Barnes (Carcanet, 2018), we are immediately ushered into a world of ambiguity, confusion, and repetition, even though it’s a simple story of a man and his two wives (none of whom is given a name). He works as a professional translator with a penchant for sixteenth century French poetry. He is especially a fan of the The Regrets, a collection of sonnets by Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560). “The title had immediately struck a chord in him. There was so much to regret.” He is also very much “a creature of habit,” a man who enjoys his daily routines. “He always made a point of leaving and returning to the flat in the same manner. Sixty-seven steps, he would say. He had got to know them so well, could, after a while, have gone up or down them blindfold.” Throughout the novel, the descriptions of the man’s three residences and his two wives often seem to be so similar that the reader can momentarily get confused. Is this London, Paris, or Wales? Is this the first wife or the second? More ominously, certain events seem to recur, with different outcomes each time.

He and his first wife, who is described as “a trainee solicitor and amateur violinist,” had lived in London. On occasion, he would secretly observe her as she exited the tube station near their house coming home from work, and he would follow her home from a distance. “It moved him to see her like this, from the outside, as it were, a young woman with a light step and straight fair-to-reddish hair.” In fact, the translator never felt as if he really knew either of his two wives. Here he is again, thinking of his first wife. “He felt at times as if he did not understand her at all. She was there and yet she was not there. He held her and yet he did not hold her. As they walked, hand in hand, he sometimes felt as if he was walking with a stranger.”

On weekends, he and his first wife liked to walk along the Thames. The circumstances that lead up to her death are told three times. In the first instance, the couple were walking along the Thames when she seemed to slip, or perhaps “the bank seemed to crumble beneath her feet.” Fortunately, she was a strong swimmer and she found a place to scramble up out of the river and the two walked safely home. In the second telling, she fell into the Thames after the two have had an argument. But then she developed an ominous cough which didn’t go away despite a round of antibiotics and we aren’t told what happens to her. In the third telling, his wife drowned, after which the translator was questioned about the incident by the police.

What did you do then? they asked at the police station when he reported it.
I sat down, he said.
You sat down?
Yes.
What do you mean, you sat down?
I sat down and waited for her to reappear.
You didn’t think of jumping in after her?
No, he said.
Why not?
I don’t know.
Try to remember, they said.
I told you, he said after a while. I thought she would reappear.
But when she didn’t?
I didn’t know where she was.
What do you mean you didn’t know where she was?
I didn’t know where to jump in. She might have swum under water. Or the current might have carried her.
So what did you do?
I came here.

After the death of his first wife, he moved to Paris, where he lived in a “small apartment at the top of a peeling building in the rue Lucrèce, behind the Pantheon.” To get to it, he had to climb the steep flight of sixty-seven steps (that I mentioned earlier) out of rue Saint-Julien. This was his haven, where he could see the dome of the Pantheon from the window near his desk where he unfailingly worked every weekday from 7:15 AM until 4:00 PM, stopping for a two-hour break at 11:00. When he remarried, he and his second wife moved to a restored farmhouse in the mountains of Wales. His second wife was made well aware that she was no match for her husband’s knowledge and interests, and so she was always explaining to their dinner guests how much he had to teach her after they were married. “He had to teach me that a Baroque suite was not something elaborate you served at the end of a meal, she would say.” And he would always respond to her: “You had other qualities.”

But apparently, his second wife and one of their frequent dinner guests—a civil servant—began to get a little too personal when they were alone in the kitchen, and the civil servant’s wife finally cornered the translator and spoke up.

Look at them! she hissed. It’s disgusting!
What is? he asked?
The way they carry on.
I’m sorry?
Anyone can see what’s going on.
I’m afraid I don’t follow you, he said.
You know, she said, looking him full in the face, that’s exactly what it is: you are afraid.
He tried to move away but she followed and pinned him to the bookcase.
Do something about it! she hissed. You understand?
Please, he said.
Because if you don’t I will.

Standing on the frozen garden he watched the flames rise into the night sky and listened to the roar of the fire as it devoured the wooden beams, mingled with the hiss of the ineffectual jets of water the firemen were still pumping into the rapidly disintegrating building.

In this telling of the fire, the house in Wales was destroyed, although his second wife survived. But a few pages later Josipovici seems to be giving us a different version of the aftermath of the fire. We see the translator apparently leaving the local morgue. “He could not believe that the charred bodies he was shown had once been living people. He could not recognise the other corpse they had dragged from the burning house. On his way out he saw Mabel, but she pretended not to see him and he for his part had nothing to say to her.” This is the only time in which a character in the book is named—Mabel, who must be the wife of the civil servant. Did she or the translator deliberately set the house of fire which killed his wife and the civil servant? We aren’t told.

One of the most beguiling things about Josipovici’s prose in The Cemetery in Barnes is his narrator’s quirky voice. Just like the main character, the narrator is also a person “of habit,” repeating the same phrases throughout the book. Take the opening paragraph, for example. It’s only two sentence long: “He had been living in Paris for many years. Longer, he used to say, than he cared to remember.” That little tossed off clause, “he used to say,” is a subtle way of suggesting to us that the translator has a habit of saying the same thing repetitively. But it’s just the first of literally hundreds of times that the narrator will use this or a similar phrase. On the first page alone, the narrator uses the phrases “he would explain” and then “he would say” a total of three times. “At my age, he would say, it’s too late to change.” Scarcely a paragraph in the book goes by without the narrator using one of these variants.

When I first wrote about this book in 2018, I tended to focus on the novel as “a maze, a Möbius loop, a multiverse.” In this reading, I thought much more about the character of the translator, a man who might be a double murderer or who might just have an overactive imagination. After the apparent death of his second wife and her lover, the final pages of the novel are occupied with the translator’s reminiscences of his days in London and in Paris. “As is the way with the imagination, thinking frequently and long enough about something makes it seem at first possible, then even probable, and, finally, necessary.” He thinks about his two wives and he remembers some of the sixteenth century poetry that has always sustained him. And then on the last page he recalls something he said to his second wife earlier in the book: “One sprouts so many lives, he would say, and look at her and smile. One is a murderer. One an incendiary. One a suicide. One lives in London. One in Paris. One in New York.” Then the book ends with him where he once lived on the rue Saint Julien in Paris. Or perhaps he never left Paris at all and the two wives were just figments of his imagination. At this point, we don’t quite know what to believe.

What I had not paid attention to in the first reading were the poems and the music of the sixteenth century which he adored and how they set a tone of regret that reflected directly on his two marriages. He’s a man who married twice, but who, deep inside, wants to be left alone.

The Cemetery in Barnes, like nearly all of Josipovici’s fictions, is a novel that reminds us how easy it would be for a life to have gone in many different directions and how one’s memories and one’s imagination are essentially interchangeable.

By the way, the real Barnes Cemetery in Putney, where the translator and his first wife lived (and presumably where she was buried), has a fascinating history.

This is book number 9 in my Vertigo 15 Books Project, in which I am looking back across fifteen years of my reading and writing Vertigo and I am selecting the fifteen titles that have really stood out during that time.

The Parasite

In her new book We the Parasites, from Sublunary Editions, the critic, essayist, and art historian A.V. Marraccini really stages an entrance. She begins by explaining the pollination of figs by female wasps. It’s a form of parasitism called mutualism, Marraccini tells us, “because the fig and the wasp need each other to produce.” But on occasion, instead of pollinating the fig, the female wasp crawls into a female fig and dies there, only to be “absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig.”

“I’m the wasp,” Marraccini declares on the next page, “I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architecture, and I make them my own. I write criticism.”

The critical gaze is also erotic; we want things, we are by a degree of separation pollinating figs with other figs by means of our wasp bodies, rubbing two novels together like children who make two dolls “have sex,” except we’ll die inside the fruit and someone else will read it and eat it, rich with all the juices of my corpse. This is an odd but sensuous thing to want. And though the male-female figs exist, and the male-female wasps, the whole process, the generative third body in the dark recesses of the inverted flower, is somehow queer. Criticism, too, is somehow queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge.

And so, three pages into her book, Marraccini has let the reader know that there is a completely new kind of critic in town. We the Parasites reads a bit like a chatty but erudite essay that revels in the world of usually unwelcome creatures. She talks about her morning coffee and her London walks, she rants about one of her previous university professors (her Chiron), and she lets us in on her hopes for a transatlantic love affair (the Girl from Across the Sea). But she also happily name drops and quotes from the ancients, including Aristotle, Theocritus, Homer, and a half dozen others. (Let’s just say that it quickly becomes clear that she really knows her way around the ancient Greek and Roman world and medieval European history). What Marraccini does in this book is elucidate her critical platform, so to speak, and then give us some demonstrations of her work in action. Her primary interests here are the poets W.H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke and the artist Cy Twombly, especially several paintings he made which have, not surprisingly, themes based in the ancient world: The Age of Alexander, 1959-60, and the ten-part painting Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978.

What becomes clear very quickly is that there is no protective wall between her professional life and her personal life. When she walks through the park, thinks about a girlfriend, or basically does any daily activity, she thinks about the ancient writers and she thinks about poets and painters. And when she reads poetry or looks at art, she thinks about the people she knows and her memories of childhood. “I see The Age of Alexander when I close my eyes at night now, and when I am out in the small hours, supposedly running.” When she watches a Spanish heist show on Netflix, she thinks of The Age of Alexander. When her doctor advises that she take iron supplements, she thinks of Hesiod, who lived in the Iron Age. I can’t think of another critic offhand other than Gabriel Josipovici whose first instinct upon dealing with the modern is to think about the ancients.

“I cannot write a disinterested review,” Marraccini wrote in a piece about Marina Abramovic at Hyperallergic. As she fleshes out her critical platform, she vectors for us the kinds of things that interest her, and establishes an ideological DNA strand for her writing. And she makes clear that she cannot and will not remove the personal from the critical. This is why so many of the pieces of writing listed on her c.v. are essentially essays.

She also wants us to know that she can be a “bad girl” type of critic. (More than once she made me think of the British artist Tracey Emin, who makes frank, confessional art about her body, her love life, and, currently, her health.) “One of my bosses told me yesterday that if I wanted him to promote me for jobs in the academy. . . I was supposed to be NICE. . . This command of niceness, of course, instead, made me want to be disgusting, untouchable, speaking dark argots in corners slick with grime.”

I grow prolix and long with sacs full of eggs, made from the nutrient slop of everything I see and hear and read. I wag my body, my segments, and it is a tongue and these are its words, asshole words I have stolen like a petty thief, words I cherish because they are not agreeable, but somehow wretched and ready to disseminate and breed.

As the title suggests, the book is filled with references to parasites, tapeworms, mosquitoes, ticks, and a host of illnesses. Marraccini is attracted to the things that gross most people out, and she uses that to great effect, somewhat in the style of the transgressive American filmmaker John Waters.

In the final part of We the Parasites, Marraccini puts it all together for us and gives us an extended essay that draws on Twombly’s painting The Shield of Achilles from the series Fifty Days at Iliam, Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” and the eighteenth book of The Iliad, which is mostly an ekphrastic description of Achilles’ shield. From these works, she writes about the confusion of rage, love, and sorrow that afflicts Achilles after Hector kills his close friend Patroclus in battle and strips him of the armor that Achilles had lent his friend. Before returning to the battle where he will avenge Patroclus’s death by killing Hector, the god Hephaestus provides Achilles with a stunningly decorated new shield.

Achilles’ Shield, as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, from Le Costume Ancien ou Moderne, ca. 1820.

She may have titled her book We the Parasites, but Marraccini is clearly one of a kind. Last fall, she took up the position as critic in residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Media, NYU Tandon, in Brooklyn. In August, 2023, she wrote about returning to America after years of living abroad. “I am coming back to America partly because of the art criticism I write about NFTs. Are you ready to hate me yet?” I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the critic who loves parasites and the ancient world should be fascinated with non-fungible tokens, those oh-so dubious bad boys of the ultra-contemporary art world. This is a short book of only 139 pages, but each page gave me so much to think about. After a second and a third reading, I think my brain has been subtly rewired.

James Elkins’ Ambitious New Novel

What happened that year made me into something different. I feel like a caterpillar unwinding myself into a cocoon, settling in, losing my appetite for leaves, forgetting my fear of birds, contracting my soft green body into a hard brown shell, erasing my caterpillar memories, saying goodbye to the sun and rain, becoming a pupa. Soon I will be lost to myself, and before that happens, I want to write this book.

When we first meet Samuel Emmer, the narrator of James Elkins’ ambitious new novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams, he works for the Water Management Department in Guelph, Ontario. It’s 2019 and, as he puts it, “something was going wrong with me.” His family life has fallen apart, his wife has left him, and his boss has put him on the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee, which is the last thing he wants to do. His role on the Committee is to travel to other zoos and familiarize himself with their most problematic animals, with the hope that the Guelph’s future zoo might be more humane. Guelph’s zoo planners want “no lions that pace endlessly or elephants that twitch and stomp or chimpanzees that pull their own fur out and scratch themself raw.”

As Samuel travels to zoos in the United States and abroad, two things begin to occur. He begins to emotionally feel the pain of the caged animals he is observing, and he is visited by a series of dreams that become more ominous with each episode. Samuel’s descriptions of his dreams are accompanied by sequences of photographs of forests. The first dreams are of innocent looking woods, a pond, a river. In the fourth dream he sees a distant fire, and with each succeeding dream the fire comes closer, more threatening. By the twelfth and final dream he realizes that “after the burning, the landscapes in my dreams were bare. No fires or smoke. I must have burned my life down.”

Elkins, who is Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, had let it be known as early as 2008 that he was working on his first novel. Being something a transparency geek, he created a section on his website called Writing Schedule where he laid out the full plan for his novel-to-be and kept readers up to date with his ongoing progress for Weak in Comparison to Dreams, including charts, graphs, word counts, dramatis personae, a synopsis of chapters, and the number of hours spent on the project. Even if you don’t read the novel (and I encourage you to!), take a look at this unique glimpse into the behind-the-curtains image of a novelist at work. If I am reading his chart correctly, Elkins has spent over 15,000 hours on his novel so far. But Weak in Comparison to Dreams, which was just published by The Unnamed Press, is only the beginning. According to Elkins’ website, it is Book 3 of a projected five-volume novel. Elsewhere on his website he refers to the numerous books that influenced his writing, including the massive novel written in multiple columns by Arno Schmidt, Zettel’s Traum (1970), which was finally translated into English in 2016 as Bottom’s Dream (Dalkey Archive Press) and is 1,496 pages long.

Just flipping through this volume’s 600 pages, it’s easy to see one of the reasons why Elkins’ book is so innovative. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is stuffed with b&w photographs (some which have lines drawn on them), charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages containing sections of musical scores. If you take a peek at his website Writing with Images, you’ll quickly see that Elkins has long been interested in the subject of how text and images interact on the page and on our screens. The variety of images he uses in Weak in Comparison to Dreams is unequaled in the world of fiction to my knowledge. Then again, Elkins is not your average art historian. He seems to have mastered multiple other disciplines as well, including several scientific disciplines, advanced mathematics, and contemporary music. But the theme for which he has harnessed these disciplines is deeply human.

As Samuel continues to visits zoos, he sees what we have all sadly witnessed when we have gone to zoos ourselves—that certain captive animals often make obsessive repetitive movements in their cages. Watching an African blue monkey, he sees that “she was protesting her intolerable existence by trying to stop time. If she did the same thing over and over, each time identically, then time would have to stop. She was refusing to let time pass, she was pretending she lived in a single spontaneous moment.” At first the book reproduces charts that graphically replicate the patterned movements of caged animals.

Later on, we see diagrams that Samuel believes show the mind maps of the animals he has been observing.

Finally, Samuel’s intern Vipesh and her “collaborator” Viperine suggest that Samuel himself has developed many of the same traits as the caged animals he has been observing, and we see charts that plot his movements around his own room.

One of the things that Elkins is suggesting is that all of the systems set up to take care of wild animals in zoos—the zoo professionals, the research scientists, the committees, the responsible politicians—have failed, and that only the empathy of individuals who look without prejudice at the unbearable horror of caged animals in zoos can see the emotional tragedy of what is really happening.

Eventually, Samuel quits his job with the Water Department and seems to be going crazy. He gets into his car and drives north toward the Arctic Circle. In the concluding section, Samuel is now a perilously old man who calls himself Emmer. “I live in a cheaply built house a hundred miles north of Guelph. A couple months ago, I was cleaning out the basement, because Fina Hodges told me it was leaking, and I came across the manuscript that I’d nearly forgotten.”

Every day I sit in my study, looking over the pages. I read about the things I said and saw forty years ago. I mainly fail to care about them, or even remember them.

This morning I am looking out the window, where an untrimmed hedge blocks my view of the uncertain distance. Can you say your life is your own when your childhood has gone so far away into the past that the boy with your name seems like someone else’s child? When you read about your own life and there’s no glow of recognition, no pleasure in revisiting scenes that had been long forgotten? I have added these Notes to explain, possibly to someone, how that feels.

Emmer’s only preoccupation in his old age is playing his piano and exploring music written for the solo piano. Composers “are the characters that fill my days and remind me what to feel.” For pages, Emmer thinks rapturously of twentieth century composers and their scores, as if they were old friends.

I see Alexei Stanchinski’s Three Sketches for Piano, feathery and lyrical, written when he was still hanging on to a normal life, before his father died, before he got hallucinations, before he was found dead by a river, not yet twenty-seven years old. Then Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Nocturnes for the Vologda River, one of his last compositions using ordinary notes, before he decided to adopt the quarter-tones in between the keys on the piano. . . And in a corner of the study, rolled up in a big cardboard tube, is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Piano Piece 11, a constellation of notes printed on a single enormous sheet of paper, like a map of some fabulous kingdom.

Elkin’s novel, which might at first look off-putting with its suggestion of complex science, higher math, and impenetrable music scores, turns out to be a novel that is all too human, a tragic story of a man who cannot solve the problems he identifies. It’s a novel about failure, empathy, memory, and loneliness. It’s about finding peace in the arts, in this case in music. And it’s a novel that questions the idea that you can truly recall your past. The reader need not master or even understand the various disciplines that Elkins indulges in. In fact, it’s perhaps better to feel a bit estranged from these faintly awe-inspiring practices.

In his summary of this book, which is found on his website, Elkins hopes that his novel will reignite “our love for the ambitious novel.” While there will be plenty of material for academics and those who wish to look deeper into the structure of this novel to pore over and write about, Weak in Comparison to Dreams was written first and foremost to be read and enjoyed. Elkins writes almost like a non-fiction writer. He’s keenly observant and always seeking the perfect description for difficult concepts and complex events, even when writing about Samuel’s dreams. This gives the book a clarity of purpose and a sense of confidence that makes it often exhilarating to read.

As of December 5, he Unnamed Press was offering a limited edition set that included a signed copy of Elkins’ book and a vinyl recording that features the author reading excerpts and playing original piano variations of sheet music that appear in the novel.

[Full disclosure: I was asked to provide a blurb for the back cover of this book, which I was pleased to do after reading it.]

Two Novels by Dorothee Elmiger

A few months ago I wrote about the Swiss writer Dorothee Elmiger’s third novel Out of the Sugar Factory, which had just been translated by Megan Ewing and published in the U.S. by Two Lines Press. It’s an elusive novel that does not want to be pigeonholed or easily described, and so reading it made me eager to get her two earlier novels, Invitation to the Bold of Heart (2018), translated from the 2010 German original by Kate Derbyshire, and Shift Sleepers (2019), translated from the 2014 German original by Megan Ewing, both published by the terrific Seagull Books. Like Sugar Factory, these are challenging books to write about. Each novel has a wisp of a plot line from which it digresses relentlessly into a number of often seemingly unrelated side areas. And each is chopped up into individual paragraphs that have extra space between them, suggesting a text of isolated segments rather than a continuous narrative.

In the dystopian Invitation to the Bold of Heart, two sisters, Margarete and Fritzi, live in a devastated and nearly abandoned town which is threatened by underground fires in coal seams that have been burning for many years. Margarete, the narrator, has read about the long lost Buenaventura river, which was last seen on an 1823 map. Explorers have searched fruitlessly for it in the past. “They missed the river, then failed to find it again, then looked too far to the south. They suspected it further eastwards, they believed it to be in the north, they doubted its existence. . . According to my own calculations, the river Buenaventura still flowed straight through this territory 240 years ago.” Her sister nodded. “Then we must look for it.” So, at its heart, Invitation to the Bold of Heart is a quest novel, as the two sisters search for the Holy Grail in the form of a lost river.

As the two make forays out into the countryside, with its poisonous gasses, burning buildings, and sinkholes, it becomes as much a voyage of discovery into their own past as much as it is an exploration of the territory that surrounds them. They discover that they have been routinely lied to as they grew up.

They covered up events. . . They instructed us to be content. They lulled us into a false sense of security. They threatened us with its loss. They feigned liberty. They did not speak to us about its shortcomings. They left us in the dark about the events of the past centuries. They told us only isolated incidents to appease us. They tested the tactics of de-escalation on us.

Margarete and Fritzi live in rooms over the town’s police station, which is captained by their father. As the novel progresses, their father and the remaining members of the police force (all men, of course) organize themselves into a private security force with potentially unchecked powers. The sisters take the hint and head out of town. Needless to say, their search for the mystical river culminates in uncertainty. The discover a sinkhole with a small channel of water. “Do we have to wait until the channel swells to a stream?” The sisters decide to declare victory. This must be the river they have been searching for.

We plan a conference that shall culminate in a great celebration. We shall undertake a trip on the Buenaventura in a wooden rowing boat which shall take us all the way to China. We shall proclaim the land anew. We shall ride in circles on Bataille and then suddenly veer off and disappear. We shall perform Bruckner’s Pains of Youth in numerous languages but we shall not put on costumes. We shall invite countless guests, among them many mining scientists, lady archaeologists, a squad of firemen, lady and gentlemen representatives of the arts, the miners of all continents, a typographer, a number of young people, bold of heart.

Invitations are printed and they set out to mail them but are stopped by an unexpected border guard. They are forced to leave the invitations and the postage money with him, hoping he will follow through with the mailing. “If the border guard doesn’t send off the letters, we’ll come back and shoot him, says Fritzi. I laugh,” Margarete writes, closing the novel. The references to Georges Bataille, the French writer and philosopher, and to Ferdinand Bruckner’s mostly forgotten play Pains of Youth (Krankheit der Jugend) are examples of the way that Elmiger tosses out hints throughout her novels that feel more atmospheric than specific.

In a brief Acknowledgments page at the end of her book, Elmiger tells us that “this text quotes freely from” and she proceeds to name more than twenty sources, including Buddha, Joseph Conrad, Wolfgang von Goethe, and Robert Walser, along with a handful of rather obscure local historians, a German technical magazine, and a Canadian post-rock band. But, in true Elmiger form, she gives us no clues as to what these quotes might be or where they might lie.

Ω

Shift Sleepers is an international “conversation” of sorts, in which at least a a half dozen different voices are contributing. It’s a cousin to Virginia Woolf’s multi-voiced novel The Waves (1931). Like Woolf’s men and women, Elmiger’s characters are all disembodied. We don’t know anything about them in terms of physical description, age, etc., except that we know where several of them are located. Elmiger’s speakers include a translator, a logistics expert, a writer, a journalist, a student, and several whose positions in life are not made clear. Think of the book as a global discussion without any visible means of communication.

The book opens with the individual known as the translator recounting a dream in which the “mass of European mountains collapse” and “a sudden explosion flushed the Alps skyward.” The logistics expert is suddenly dropping things and has had a glass shatter on the kitchen floor. A radio is announcing freezing deaths in Europe. It’s night across Europe and our handful of conversants are up late, sleepless, thinking about dreams and about the concept of national borders.

Shift Sleepers is very loosely organized around the subject of immigrants—immigrants seeking entrance to Europe, the political backlash against them, and the terrible conditions of migrant workers once they do arrive. The title refers to the way in which poor immigrants become forced to rent short-term sleeping spaces because they cannot afford to rent their own rooms or apartments. But as with her other novels, the speakers digress frequently into other areas. They talk about family. The phone rings and must be answered. They talk about the authors they read—Walt Whitman, Fleur Jaggy.

They talk multiple times about Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch artist whose artworks and disappearance continue to fascinate other artists. In 1975, Ader set out in a small dinghy to do a solo crossing of the Atlantic as part of a performance art piece called “In search of the miraculous.” His boat eventually showed up in Ireland without him and he is presumed to have drowned at sea.

Another repeated topic of conversation is La Réunion, a utopian community founded in 1855 in an area of Texas that is now Dallas. La Réunion consisted of about 400 French, Swiss, and Belgian men and women who tried to create a communist community based on the ideas of the French philosopher Charles Fourier. The community failed after two years.

Shift Sleepers is the most political of Elmiger’s three novels. All of the book’s voices share a pro-immigrant viewpoint and advocate for the freer flow of immigrants across Europe. But the discussions about Bas Jan Ader and La Réunion—a mysterious death at sea and a utopian vision that became a lost cause—reflect the melancholy tone that pervades the novel. Emiger’s world is slippery, tangential, and ephemeral. In all of her three novels the real subject seems to be half-hidden—whether it is sugar and the slave trade, the environment and male privilege, or immigration—masked beneath a tangle of conversations, dreams, and other diversions. This clearly seems to be a literary tactic on her part. You don’t read the novels of Dorothee Elmiger for answers. On the contrary. Her novels are full of loose ends and unfinished conversations. I don’t think Elmiger is challenging the reader to solve puzzles or make linkages between obscure connections. Instead, I think she is only asking—or perhaps demanding—that we be open. It is the very idea that these novels are so deliberately perplexing that I find them equally thrilling. But I also have to wonder if Elmiger’s melancholy doesn’t also reflect an acknowledgement of the difficult battle that she and everyone with liberal opinions faces in today’s world.

Teju Cole’s Tremor

His material world is set in the world of white learning. He is in the center of that and he flowers in it, not without some doubt, not without some shame. But he knows that he can only do so because there is another life into which his roots are sunk, a life to which he has access through language, through dance, through music.

Tunde

In Teju Cole’s third novel, Tremor (Random House, 2023), we follow Tunde, a highly respected photographer and writer born in Nigeria, who now teaches at Harvard. His work in both fields has made him famous enough to lecture and be feted around the globe. Wherever he goes, he seeks out the local culture—the museums, the artists, and, above all else, the music.

Not surprisingly, given the direction of so many novels these days, some of the key facts of Tunde’s biography closely match those of Teju Cole’s bio. He also teaches at Harvard and has been feted around the world for his mind, writing, and photography. Tremor is Cole’s third novel and in each of them the main character has always been based on an outline of Cole’s own life story. In his debut novel, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), the book’s unnamed narrator is “a writer and photographer currently based in New York” who returns to Lagos, the Nigerian city where he was raised, where he finds himself surrounded by pervasive violence and corruption and a near total lack of what he then understands to be culture. The only signs of creativity and hope that he encounters are in the internet cafes, where he watches the “419 yahoo yahoos” (named after the section of the criminal code they violate), the young men whose endless email scams used to clog everyone’s email in-boxes. They tirelessly ply their trade, pay a small bribe when arrested, and then simply move on to a different internet café. In the end, the narrator fails to reestablish a close bond with his family or his countrymen, and he heads home to the United States.

In Open City (2011), Julius, an immigrant from Nigeria who is of mixed German and Nigerian parentage, is in New York studying to become a psychiatrist.  He is something of a loner who likes to wander the city on foot and by subway, describing what he sees, hears, and thinks, giving us, among other gifts, a remarkable panoramic image of New York City and its history. Julius clearly loves his adopted city, but he is dedicated to scraping below the surface for the ghosts of New York’s shameful past, such as the history of the slave trade that operated out of the city’s ports, bringing riches to the city’s bankers and merchants. Throughout Open City, Julius is confronted with people who want to pigeonhole his identity and who want to recruit him to their vision or their cause. Africans claim his identity and heritage (even though he is half German), African Americans call him brother, Islamists try to radicalize him. But almost uniformly Julius wants no part of causes or labels, though eventually he is forced to ask himself if this kind of neutrality is possible in today’s world. To him it seemed as if the safest path “was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties.” But, he asked himself, “was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?”

In Tremor, Cole has answered this question. Tremor opens with a confrontation. Tunde is trying to photograph the honeysuckle hedge that separates his yard from his neighbor’s when “an aggressive voice” calls out. “You can’t do that here, the voice says, this is private property.” Tunde tenses up, retrieves his tripod and camera, and retreats. Despite his judicious retreat from a racist neighbor, he is an assertive activist. Cole’s new main character is no longer comfortable just discovering the ghosts of the past. He is teaching his students the hidden truths about history, he is teaching them ethics. He is tired of “the long and persistent history of white people thinking they know better than the rest of us.” He’s especially wary of culture and cultural spaces. He sees every museum as a “a storehouse of other people’s stolen worlds” and he wants to hold them accountable for the objects they have acquired unlawfully, particularly objects gathered up from once colonized nations. He teaches his students “to always stay alert for the ‘uh-oh’ moment, to be primed for that incident in which some additional wickedness emerges in the conventional story being told.”

We follow Tunde as he teaches, goes antiquing with his wife, interacts with friends and colleagues, and travels to Nigeria several times. In Tunde, Cole has created a main character who so dominates his novel that he consumes nearly all the acreage of the book. Tunde’s wife Sadako, who was born in Japan, is a character we see only infrequently. But their relationship clued me into aspects about him that made me realize that Tunde is not the flawless character the book seems to want him to be. In one of the first times we see the couple interacting together, Tunde listens to Sadako fall asleep next to him in bed and then he immediately turns his thoughts to how much he enjoys talking with his Harvard colleague Emily, because she is one of those people “who have stared into the immense complexity of the Andromeda galaxy or of C. elegans or Sanskrit or geometry and have made it communicate with the immense complexity of their own brains.” We do not learn anything more about Sadako before she abruptly moves out of their house one day and Tunde seems to have no idea why. “Who knows what’s happening in someone else’s head?” he thinks.

Eventually, Sadako returns to the marriage, not entirely sure that Tunde understands her any better. “The ripple back in September seemed to take him by surprise. But that was the problem, that he somehow hadn’t seen or sensed what was building up. She loves him for his intelligence and kindness. She loves him above all for his wish to be good. But a wish is not the same as a will and sometimes she is troubled by how unaware he can be of his failings.” As if to demonstrate that unawareness, almost as soon as Sadako returns, Tunde departs for a long visit to Lagos, leaving Sadako to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family.

“You”

Throughout Tremor Tunde addresses a mysterious absent someone as “you.” This absent friend turns out to be Mark, a man who served as his correspondent and mentor for more than twenty years. The two met by accident at the Kunstmuseum Basel where they bonded over several paintings by Hans Holbein that they both admired. But “music was the emotional core of the friendship.” Mark, who has now been dead for three years, advised Tunde on specific recordings to listen to. Over the years, they went to concerts together in different cities and talked endlessly about music. Tunde speaks to him and thinks of him frequently throughout the novel. After an exceptional night of music and dancing in Lagos, for example, Tunde “thinks about how he would describe to you the exquisite embodiment at the heart of it. You were not a dancer but you were a listener and he wishes he could tell it to you.”

Lucas

Globetrotting Tunde seems to make friends wherever he goes, even in Lagos. He talks freely with strangers in clubs, smokes marijuana with them, and dances with them. But when he meets Lucas, the son of his mentor, for the first time over lunch, he’s oddly chilly. “The son is a stranger to me and friendship is nontransferable. Even as we sit down to lunch I know I will do my duty and move on. I needn’t become friends with him.” It stuck out to me like a sore thumb that Tunde was oddly unreceptive to Lucas. This is the son of the person Tunde respected more than anyone he knows and with whom he corresponded by letter, email, or phone several times a week for more than two decades. Cole makes Tunde’s attitude so clear that it seems like it must indicate something, but I’m damned if I know what.

“Effortless Virtuosity”

Tremor echoes with music of all kinds, from a Deniece Williams’ song on the radio on one of the opening pages to John Coltrane’s “Naima,” playing at a party on the closing pages. Tunde listens to a wide range of popular music, jazz, classical music, and West African music. The high point for him is undoubtedly three consecutive nights attending live music at clubs and other venues in Lagos. On the final night he listens to several bands that had their start in the early 1970s, “in that age of optimism when the colonial shackles were newly off and the future was bright.” “Whatever was played was played with focus and with that effortless virtuosity that is a byword for Manding musicianship—but one should never call virtuosity effortless.” Tunde’s goal is to lose himself—and the world—through music. “Something exists in spite of everything we know to be true of the world. Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.”

Cole writes exquisitely about music and how people hear it, and he is especially attuned to Coltrane. “Coltrane enfolded into his sheets of sound the eloquence of the AME Zion Church but also the wilder and weirder dissonances of Holiness practices. His choices are musically driven but in his spirit is a consistent preference for ecstasy over entertainment. Every note he plays is air from his body, every song on these albums a transcript of his breath.”

The Twenty-Four Voices of Lagos

In one long chapter, Cole lets twenty-four residents of Lagos tell us about their lives, hopes, and struggles in their own voices. This is when it becomes eminently clear that, even though much of the novel takes place in and around Harvard University, Tremor is really a novel whose heart and soul is in Nigeria. In this chapter, each resident of Lagos gets two or three pages to create a snapshot of their current moment. One woman is suing her brother because he is selling their father’s property but not sharing the proceeds with her. One man describes getting scammed in a business deal. One person is in the midst of transitioning to become a woman. One boy describes a violent home invasion that happened to his family. The cumulative effect is to give us a striking and intimate picture of people struggling to survive daily and facing an endless string of adversities that include gangs, poverty, alcoholism, and corruption, with only their willpower and wits to help them keep going. In the final segment a man tries to drive home one night through flooded roads because parts of Lagos are built on landfill, while roads in another part of town are blocked because a fuel tanker has overturned and exploded. “The city was drowning and burning at the same time.”

Immediately following the voices of the citizens of Lagos, we get Tunde’s impressions of Lagos in a chapter in which every paragraph begins with a variation of “When he returned to the city he realized that. . .” Tunde characterizes Lagos in several ways. As a city in which “the national religion” is a lottery that confirms in its population “the brutal intuition that life only makes sense when there are a few winners and numerous losers.” As a city that feels like a two-dimensional stage set filled with four-dimensional people who “seduce each other all day long, their bodies smelling of sweat, pheromones, and the restlessness of life,” and “make love with the tremulous joy of first-timers, the solemnity of undertakers, the insouciance of professionals, the vigor of perverts, and the untiring ardor of immortals.” A city in which “one wrong move could be fatal and so no one makes a wrong move.” A city in which the people are like reeds; “they bend with the wind in order not to be broken by it.” Despite the fact that “there might be something rotten beneath” Lagos, Tunde thinks it is “a sybaritic paradise.” “The city is unique in having neither aristocrats nor untouchables. Its citizens are radically equal.” The Teju Cole who found Lagos disappointing and lacking in culture when he wrote Every Day Is for the Thief, now thinks the city is pretty special and bursting with art.

But Lagos has one final surprise for Tunde. One day he sees “a twin he never knew he had.” It’s his doppelgänger, a harsh reminder of his own “replaceability,” his own mortality, that shakes Tunde so much he leaves Lagos the same day.

It’s not clear what the appearance of Tunde’s doppelgänger signifies. Other than returning home immediately, Tunde doesn’t change in any apparent way. In fact, shortly after his return he doubles down on his belief that it is no longer tolerable to be politically neutral. He decides to research and critique a piece of temporary public artwork that was installed in an outdoor space at Harvard where he frequently walks, even though the installation occurred twenty-five years earlier, “well before my time,” as he puts it. Tunde has been haunted by the fact that, in the eighteenth century, the President of Harvard maintained four African American slaves in a house nearby. Therefore, he is struck when he reads in the catalogue about the public artwork that the artist had said that he did not want “to be positioned in the sense of appearing to celebrate [Harvard] or to be positioned by somehow seeming to critique it.” “Why” Tunde asks, “would he not wish to seem to critique the institution” which once housed slaves? Tunde argues that by taking no position, the artist did celebrate Harvard and its racist history. “There is no view from nowhere,” he declares.” It is not possible to be neutral.

Ω

Tremor is a compelling book full of compelling and important messages. Cole writes powerfully—no, brilliantly—about race, history, and culture. He is one of our most eloquent writers about the arts, especially music. But if I think about Tremor as the novel that it’s subtitle proclaims and not as an extended essay on racism or post-colonial violence or cultural theft, then it’s apparent that Cole is stretching the novel’s form tightly and thinly like a drum skin over the framework of the essay format. In fact, there is a literal transcription of a lecture that Tunde gives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the middle of the book. Tunde is the novel’s only well-developed character. Everyone else is little more than a stick figure, including his wife, Sadako. We are told that she works for a pharmaceutical company, but apparently it isn’t important enough that we know whether she is a secretary, a research scientist, or the company president.

More importantly, Tunde strikes me as a slightly worrisome messenger to be delivering such critical messages. He has a batch of character flaws that the book apparently wants us to overlook. It’s obvious that he loves his wife, Sadako, but it’s on his own terms and heedless of her needs. When he meets his revered friend’s son, he can think only of himself. Like many individuals who have been elevated to certain heights in society, he has become blind to the distance between his own globe-trotting lifestyle and that of the ordinary people he tries to reach in his classes and lectures. For example, when a night of music and dancing in Lagos “called out” to Tunde of “other nights of desire and satiation like the cold night we danced in Harlem or that time on Victoria Island when the vice president’s daughter had too much to drink or that other night in São Paulo when we went to Avenida Liberdade or that other night of Amapiano among strangers in Cape Town, that night in Beirut, that night in Berlin, that night in Bogotá,” Tunde seems to have no awareness that he is not moving in the same circles as 99% of the planet. Elsewhere Tunde tells us, without any apparent irony, that “the work I do takes me to places where I am received as a guest of honor, places where I try to think and speak and where I try to avoid speechifying.” And yet he is constantly speechifying, constantly trying to tell others how to think, how to behave, as his ethical lessons and historical “uh-oh” moments unspool page after page.

One of the few times when Tunde has a tiny glimpse of self-awareness that might let him see himself differently comes when he views four photographs by Gilles Peress in a museum. Peress is a well-known documentary photographer, a fighter for the underdog, and a Professor of Human Rights at Bard College. Tunde observes that these four photographs by Peress were “taken” in Iran and Azerbaijan and then he parenthetically adds: “’Taken’ I say when describing other people’s photographs but for my own I default to ‘made’—because I can vouch for my own intentions?” The presence of that question mark suggests that Tunde is, for once at least, questioning the implications of his own vocabulary. Throughout the novel, it feels as if Cole doesn’t trust his readers enough to be subtle, to infer, to show and not tell, as the old creative writing cliché goes. He has spent the last dozen years writing essays, and perhaps that habit is hard to break.

Tremors

The book’s title refers to a trio of earthquakes that are briefly mentioned. As a student, Sadako mildly experiences the Kobe earthquake of 1995 while living in Osaka, twenty miles away. There are also references to the 1990 earthquake in northern Iran and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. But personal tremors are the important ones. When he learns that his colleague Emily has colon cancer, Tunde suddenly realizes that the ground below any one of us can open suddenly and swallow us. “Life is not only more terrible than we know it is more terrible than we can know.” (It’s hard not to notice that Tunde is considerably more disturbed by Emily’s cancer than he was when his wife temporarily left their marriage.)

The final tremor comes at the end of the book when Tunde himself is mysteriously shaken. After he and Sadako host a party, he goes out in the late hours on a clear winter night and successfully photographs the honeysuckle hedge without incurring the wrath of his neighbor, who is most likely asleep. But after going to bed, Tunde has an attack of vertigo and “the room seems to be moving.” Eventually the vertigo subsides. Sadako soothes him and he falls asleep. The last line of the book is: “I slow my breathing and soon I hear nothing.” Is this attack of vertigo meant to signify something? Self-awareness? A change of character? We are not given a clue, we can only speculate wildly. Hopefully, Teju Cole’s next novel will point the way.

Mild Vertigo

Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo (New Directions, 2023) is a little miracle of a novel about the daily life of an average suburban Tokyo housewife, written in a kind of flattened prose in which nearly all emotions of the characters are tamped down or ignored. All that seems to matter are the details of the day’s minutiae. Kanai even seems to want to forego the possibility of any kind of writerly style. Mild Vertigo reads like a kind of anti-literature, as if its prose were meant to appear slightly boring. Which makes sense, since the book represents what Natsumi, the apparently random housewife with a husband and two children, thinks and hears over a period of days or weeks (time is not really determined in the book). Natsumi’s mother uses the famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—as proof that happiness for everyone is meant to be “mediocre and uneventful, it’s the same in any household—and it’s boring.” To which Natsumi replies, “I’m okay with that.”

Somehow, Kanai makes it gripping to follow Natsumi along as she goes about her routine day, making dinner, washing dishes, eating out with friends, gossiping with neighbors, riding the underground, and so on. The opening sentence is four pages long and describes the apartment that Natsumi and her family have just moved into. Natsumi especially liked the fact that “the front door didn’t open directly into the kitchen, there was instead a proper vestibule, even if it was slightly cramped, which led to a hall, and a door with glass panels framed in white wood separating the hall from the main living space, which meant you could avoid having visitors unexpectedly catching a glimpse of your chaotically messy kitchen. . .” Later on, the book spends nearly five pages during which Natsumi recalls a conversation about washing underwear. And yet disturbing undercurrents flow through the novel—rumors, dinner discussions that casually move into unforeseen and unpleasant directions, conversations that turn mean. People are committing suicide, jumping out of windows. A neighbor reportedly “murders” a stray cat by pouring boiling water over it. It seems to Natsumi that a surprising number of her acquaintances are having affairs. One gossip even tells her about a supposed ring of housewife prostitutes.

Thus, it is perhaps not unsurprising that at unpredictable moments, when there is a disconnect between the image of a safe, boring suburbia and reality, Natsumi experiences a bit of mild vertigo. Sometimes, these moments can be “strangely pleasant,” as it is the time she is washing the dishes.

. . . it’s as she’s rinsing off the soap under the tap that she finds herself there, a plate held in her hand, staring fixedly at the running water. The rays of morning light pouring in through the window make the rope of water streaming from the tap twinkle and sparkle, and the water sends spray spattering about the sink as it’s sucked down into the drain, flowing continuously, ceaselessly, not exactly noisily but creating a slight reverberation as the water and the air echo through the pipes, and the water spills over the rim of the plastic tub, making a faint trickling noise.

It’s not a big deal or anything, but do you ever find that happening to you? I guess you don’t do the dishes very often, but what if you’re brushing your teeth, say, do you not ever just find yourself staring at the water as it rushes down the drain? And it’s strangely pleasant, that feeling, of course it’s no big deal, but you kind of zone out, as if you’re dreaming, although it’s not any dream in particular that you’re having. And then you come back to yourself with a jolt as you realize that you’re wasting water, I guess you just wouldn’t understand it as a man who so rarely does any housework, Natsumi said to her husband.

But at other times, Natsumi’s vertigo takes on more serious dimensions.

When she sat down on the sofa, the bleak view of the suburban residential landscape—a whole forest of apartments and commercial buildings in mismatched gray and beige that went on uninterrupted for as far as the eye could see aside from a few spots of green here and there where trees were growing—which you saw from the window when standing up would disappear, and what lay stretched out beyond the open window was the summer sky, dazzling in its blueness—the kind of sky that seemed like it could suck you right in—and she felt her head growing hazy, despite lying down she began to feel quite dizzy, and it was hard to say whether it was her whole body or just her field of vision, but whichever it was, she began reeling from side to side, so she closed her eyes, and when she looked away from the sky there were orange disks on the back of her eyelids as if they’d been branded there, and on the backrest of the sofa, she saw two or three of her husband’s thin, black hairs with a brownish sheen, together with a single gray one, stuck to the raised gray acrylic fabric as if slicing into it, glowing into the light.

In a way, Kanai’s writing mimics Natusmi’s cooking. “She couldn’t bring herself to make the sorts of meals that would mess up the kitchen.” For the most part, Kanai doesn’t want to draw any attention to her writing. It wants to be invisible. Kanai even takes a sly poke at her own project when she has a neighbor of Natsumi’s complain about a fiction-writing class she has just taken at the local Culture Center. “The teacher droned on about how important it was to include all kinds of descriptions of things” in fiction, said the neighbor, who quit the class and switched to a screenplay-writing class “where the story developed solely through the dialogue between characters.” But whenever Natsumi has an episode of vertigo, Kanai’s pen perks up and we get a moment of glorious prose, as in the last example, where the focus shifts cinematically from the landscape outside Natsumi’s window to the back of her eyelids to the stray hairs on the back of the couch.

But there is another way in which Kanai (and her translator Polly Barton) work brilliantly with words. It has to do with the way in which Kanai creates complex scenes. Once again, my example, which comes at the very end of Mild Vertigo, feels cinematic. Natsumi stops at a used bookstore in Tokyo and finds herself attracted by the “crass illustrations” on the covers and the rather lurid sounding blurbs of novels by two women she has never heard of—Edna O’Brien and Iris Murdoch. She “had an impulse to read just this kind of turbulent, romantic novel that veered so wildly from reality for once” and so she buys both books. Ready to return home, she stops for coffee in the train station and accidentally leaves one of the books on her table. When a young man catches up with her to return her book to her, she suddenly realizes “how genuinely rare an event it was for a housewife to speak to any other man than her own husband.” As she contemplates this while riding the train homeward, she remembers that when she was young she certainly wanted to be “sexually desirable,” but “now, she wasn’t even conscious of the fact that she was being treated as a sexless middle-aged woman.” In contrast to Natsumi’s inner conversation, some nearby teenage boys are complaining loudly to each other that the girls their age are too aggressive. “We haven’t even done anything and already it’s I love you I hate you and all that shit.” It’s better to get porn videos than real girlfriends. And on the other side of Natsumi are some women in their sixties talking about fish sausage and what day their garbage is collected, and then both conversations become blended for a few pages, giving us a magnificent mashup of three generation’s concerns simultaneously. Ultimately, Natsumi tunes everyone else out and starts to think about what to make for dinner that night. “She started visualizing how the supermarket looked inside, how she would go in and, across the aisle from the vegetable section immediately to her left-hand side containing salad and green vegetables. . .” After two full pages of mentally roaming the aisles of the supermarket, “her field of vision began to sway slightly in a way that was different from the vibrations of the train, as if she were experiencing a kind of mild vertigo.”

Mild Vertigo is one of those plotless books you can read simply for the pleasure of submerging yourself in someone else’s life for a few hours, while you watch a master writer create magic out of thin air. It has some common touch points with Danielle Dutton’s 2018 novel Sprawl, which I wrote about in March of this year. (Keep in mind that Mild Vertigo is a translation from Japanese into English, which makes it very difficult to make definitive statements about the nature of the original writing style.) Both are novels that have deeply critical views about suburbia and modern life in general. And in both novels the main characters are completely caught up in their milieu and are therefore relatively oblivious to any of its downsides. I’ve described the writing in both books as having a kind of “flatness,” although what I mean in each case is a bit different. In Kanai’s book “flatness” means displaying little or no emotion. In Dutton’s book “flatness” means that no one sentence is privileged above another, so there really aren’t any hints that direct the reader to the author’s intentions. It’s up to the reader to decide where the emphasis or drama lies or if there is any at all in Sprawl. This flatness, this refusal of the author to bare her soul through the mouthpiece of her book’s narrator, which I am seeing more and more of in novels, can be seen as the polar opposite of the immersive self-exposure of autofiction.

Mieko Kanai. Mild Vertigo. NY: New Directions, 2023. Translated from the 1997 Japanese original by Polly Barton.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s New Novel of Questions: Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck’s compelling new novel Kairos (New Directions, 2023) has a simple, agonizing plot line. Katharina, a young East German theater design student, falls in love with Hans, a married novelist who is thirty-four years older. For 294 pages and about six years, we follow the ups and downs of their relationship, which, plotted out, might look something like the craggy outline of any stock market index over the same period of time. Both the novel and the love relationship seem to be slowly building toward the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. We watch the pre-fall struggles of the East German government and the growing temptations that the West offered to East German citizens. After the fall of the Wall, Katharina worries that she is going to be just “another customer” and Hans feels that, instead of becoming an exile by leaving his country, “his country is leaving him.” One of Katharina’s friends wryly notes that “Coca Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at unifying the proletarians of all nations under its banner.”

Just underneath the love story of Katharina and Hans lies a world of issues ready to be engaged by any reader willing to pull at the loose threads which Erpenbeck has left scattered throughout her novel. Kairos carries on several intertwined themes that she started in her 2008 novel Heimsuchung (Visitation 2018) and continued with the 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen (Go, Went, Gone, 2017), themes like her disdain for capitalism, her unhappiness with the manner in which West Germany simply absorbed and erased East Germany overnight, and her ongoing regret for the human potential that socialism might have had under a more democratic East Germany. In fact, the affair between Hans and Katharina might well be a metaphor for the love/hate relationship between the people of East Germany (officially the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) and the DDR itself. Hans was, at least for a while, we learn, a Stasi (or secret police) informer, and he routinely interrogates Katharina to the point of terrorizing her over petty infractions to their relationship. At one point, shortly after reading transcripts of the Moscow “show trials” of 1937-8, he actually grills her in a similar manner, complete with fake evidence of her “misconduct” with a fellow student. On top of all of this, their physical relationship is literally based upon his whipping her with a belt. Much to the reader’s distaste, Katharina stays in the relationship because she has convinced herself that she wants to, and she believes she has earned every bit of punishment dished out to her. Most of the time, she refuses to acknowledge her own fear of Hans or her guilt for staying with him.

Then there are the questions. The novel opens with one. “Will you come to my funeral?” Hans asks her. And the questions never stop. As the couple listen to Mozart’s Requiem and the tenor sings about Judgement Day, Hans asks himself “How will I fare, when it is my turn to speak?”

“So what does freedom look like?”

“How long does it take for the dead to be forgotten?”

“Was a human being just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy? Did you have any control over what you saw in the mirror? Or was one helplessness merely succeeded by another?”

“Why do the dead not mean anything to you? [Hans] asked his father, and his father had said nothing back.”

“But is anyone still interested in what happened at Babi Yar?”

“Can the consciousness of the working class be raised without turning it into a petit bourgeois consciousness?”

As Hans thinks about socialism, he wonders “What cause would ever again be great enough to unite victims and murderers in one heartbeat?”

“Why are you crying?”

I think one of the reasons that Erpenbeck puts so many of these essentially rhetorical questions in her novel is to directly address the reader, to force the reader to momentarily become a character in her novel, and have to think about the same issues the other characters are faced with.

I found Hans to be an unpleasant character and I think Erpenbeck wants the reader to see him as increasingly acting cruel and thoughtless to Katharina. Nevertheless, in a scene that takes place six months after Hans’ death, the title of the book is introduced. We are told that “Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him.” Once he has slipped past, it’s too late. “Was it a fortunate moment, then, when she, just nineteen, first met Hans?” she wonders. Despite the accusations, betrayals, lies, tears, and the many break-ups, the answer remains open. Kairos had already slipped by. Katharina, we are told, will have a new life after Hans, just as the former East Germany will merge with the former West Germany. But if she were asked if she could be with Hans again, I don’t think Katharina would be grabbing Kairos’ forelock this time either.

Germans, especially those of you who once lived in East Germany, will undoubtedly read Kairos very differently from me. You will surely recognize signs and patterns of behavior that I simply don’t see or think important. Nevertheless, Kairos is a powerful book, with much to offer any reader. It is likely to remind some readers of Lisa Halliday’s strong 2018 novel Asymmetry, in which a young female editor gets involved in an affair with a much older novelist (a Philip Roth-type character). But I do think Erpenbeck’s novel resonates on more levels.

The fall of the Berlin Wall 9 November 1989. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Dorothee Elmiger’s Hunger

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The Second Coming, Yeats.

As is made clear right from the outset, the point of Dorothee Elmiger’s new novel Out of the Sugar Factory (Two Lines Press) is that the narrator—whether that is the author herself or a fictional character—has a desperate hunger. “Perhaps it would be correct to say that this hunger is the real object of my research.” Elmiger’s novel is ostensibly about the history of the sugar trade, along with the history of the slave trade and the raw reality of capitalism, both of which were indispensable to the sugar trade in the Caribbean and the American South. But Out of the Sugar Factory is filled with so many digressions, so many other topics, all of which seem to equally concern the narrator. She has a persistent fixation on insane asylums and on Ellen West (1888–1921), a woman who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa and who died by suicide. She is deeply curious about the famous Russian dancer Nijinsky, about St. Teresa of Avila, and about the Swiss “lotto king” Werner Bruni, the first man to win more than a million Swiss francs but who became bankrupt in less than six years. She’s even fascinated with the history and famous inhabitants of Montauk, that village on the far tip of Long Island.

The obvious question is: how does the reader weave all of this disparate material together? Or do we? Early on, the narrator’s friend Annette tells her she has just read “a novel by an Australian writer in which a long series of abruptly appearing images was described; each image evoked the next, which is to say they were, at a minimum, loosely connected and thus formed a kind of path—a luminous path, she claimed, through the things.” By contrast, when the narrator looks back through all of the research files she created over the course of the past months, she sees “no path—no images or illuminations overlapping each other.” Instead, what she discerns is a single starting point and many lines radiating out from there. “There is no fixed order to this place; with each stride through the chaos. . . objects seem to enter into new relationships, new constellations with each other.”

This is how Elmiger’s novel operates. She’s not aiming to tell a story or even mimic a stream of consciousness. She’s after something more tenuous, more elusive, perhaps something more disjointed like real life. The reader has to be prepared to appreciate chaos—or perhaps disorder is a better word—because Elmiger doesn’t make any connections for us. There is no grand denouement or pull-it-all-together a-ha moment. This is a book in which to savor individual scenes, paragraphs, and sentences, one after another, as Elmiger slowly grapples with the topics that possess her.

These sentences, I have to understand, will never achieve any kind of pure, radiant clarity, ridding themselves of all additional and confused meanings. They are actually more flickering, difficult constructions, I think, dark whirlpools in which everything, including everything peripheral, swirls with deafening noise forever around an unstable center. And more is always being pulled in.

It is for this reason that Elmiger’s novel gets compared to those of W.G. Sebald, another writer who tried to break the linear structure of the novel by constantly sending the reader spiraling out from each page to follow new digressions, new veiled references, and the things we see in his strange photographs. While there are no photographs in Out of the Sugar Factory, at the end of the book there are 240 footnotes to sources for quotations and references that Elmiger has employed, sources that include a rather amazing array of books of poetry, novels, histories, biographies, and travel narratives. As you can see from the photograph below, even the physical space of the novel is broken into small segments.

Throughout the book there are conversations marked by em dashes, when it seems that the narrator is having a conversation with herself or interviewing herself.

—How are you?
—I’m in over my head.
—The underbrush you were talking about?
—Fine by me, if that’s what you want to call it.
—Can you say more about it?
—Everything becomes too much for me. At the beginning, I thought I had to somehow gather everything together, bring it all together, but now things are imposing themselves on me virtually—I see signs and connections everywhere, as if I had found a theory of everything, which is of course utter nonsense.

Nearly halfway through the book, Elmiger tries again to suggest how we might read her novel. Her narrator is thinking about a conversation she had with Annette about Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French philosopher (1908–1961) who emphasized the role that perception plays in our conception of the world around us.

And on the so-called “geometral”: Imagine, says A., for example, a house in France, not far from the Seine. High up in the air is a plane making its way. This house is always viewed from a certain direction, from a certain perspective; one sees it differently from the bank of the Seine than from the airplane or from its own interior, the interior of the house. But the actual house, the actual house on the bank of the Seine in France—Merleau-Ponty writes—is different from all these hundreds and thousands of views of this house seen from a great height, or from the other bank, or from the inside.

Not only is there no center, no focus, no linear narrative to her novel (or her “research report,” as she prefers to call it), but Elmiger is suggesting that every reader will perceive her novel from a completely different viewpoint. In some press materials, the publisher of Out of the Sugar Factory says that “Elmiger compiles a journal of reflections on global systems of capital through the medium of her personal patterns of experience.” If all of this seems to suggest that Out of the Sugar Factory is rather toothless as a novel about capitalism and slavery, I would have to agree. She has given us material straight out of her many research files, even out of her dreams. But she has not given us an argument. Let’s go back to the very beginning of the novel once again to see why. The narrator tells us that she finds herself watching a certain scene in a documentary video over and over. We will only learn the context for this scene on one of the last pages of the book. But through this brief, rather mundane event, Elmiger wants to explain to us her theory about her obsessions and the impact they have on her.

The more I return to this room, which I know only from a documentary produced in the 80s, the clearer it becomes that my urge to revisit this place has nothing to do with the chance that something might reveal itself with any particular clarity to me. On the contrary, I now suspect that these recurrent visits, my neurotic pilgrimages, are grounded in the fact that the scene is, so to speak, irresolvable: a brief convergence of the most diverse strands of history—as if disparate rocky objects, celestial bodies that had long been circling the sun, seemingly unconnected, suddenly collided, and their impact provided an illumination of things, of rubble and dust, one second long.

Emiger’s rather emotionless sense that history is essentially “irresolvable” doesn’t strike me as the most helpful perspective for someone who is obsessed with such serious subjects as the history of the sugar trade and slavery and the dangers of capitalism. Out of the Sugar Factory is, in many respects, a fascinating novel to read, but a very strange one to ponder.

Ω

Martin, my editor, says that in case of publication of these notes, “novel” must appear on the cover.

We drive through Munich in a small white car.

I say that it is a report about research, which is why “research report” seems incomparably more appropriate to me.

Dorothee Elmiger. Out of the Sugar Factory. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2023. Translated from the 2020 German original by Megan Ewing.

For excellent reports on Elmiger’s earlier two novels, I strongly suggest you head over to Joseph Schreiber’s blog Roughghosts where you can read about her first book Invitation to the Bold of Heart and her second, Shift Sleepers.

The Multiverse that Is Danielle Dutton’s “Sprawl”

When I first bought Danielle Dutton’s Sprawl (Wave Books, 2018) I wasn’t in the right mood for its peculiar gifts as a novel. I vaguely remember struggling for twenty pages or so then giving up and putting it back on my to-read bookshelf. This last act is key, because it didn’t go in the pile of books to be donated to the public library book sale. I must have realized that the fault was with me, not the book. I just wasn’t ready for Sprawl.

But now it is five years and hundreds of books later and apparently I am ready for the perverse genius that is Sprawl. As I began to read it this time, a sense of giddy vertigo ascended within me. With each sentence, Dutton was building up a unique world and simultaneously hollowing it out. She was showing us a suburbia that looked a bit like every American suburbia that ever existed, and yet with every sentence it turned weirder and weirder. Dutton lets slip in the book’s third sentence exactly what she is doing in Sprawl.

This place is as large as any other town. Each new day there is the coming through of sunlight between the oaks. Things fall and because of this there is a kind of discontinuous innovation.

“Discontinuous innovation.” I can’t think of a better way to describe what Dutton has created with Sprawl than a novel that propels itself forward through discontinuous innovation. At the sentence level there is only chaos. Sprawl has an attention span of two or three sentences at most before it forgets what it is about and moves on to something else. In this sense, the restless prose of Sprawl is yet another genetic descendant of Renata Adler’s fragmented 1976 novel Speedboat. Here’s an example from early in Sprawl, narrated by Mrs. Haywood Henry, our sometimes host.

In this place we eat chicken and peas at least once a week. Once a month we organize three weeks’ worth of leftovers and once upon a time Mrs. Richardson introduced a new trend that was spatially interesting; it was intended to embellish our looks like poodle skirts or microwaves. We smoked clove cigarettes and stood in the Millers’ backyard. I refer to these as “the early times.” And other trends: We wrote poems. I wrote them with Lisle. I wrote her poems and she wrote mine. We followed each other around town without looking, like tribal migrations. Today, Haywood uses language to articulate a room and I’m supposed to move inside it.

One day our narrator thinks that her neighborhood represents a “utopian vision” and another day she thinks that “the smells in the neighborhood reach a peak of perfection: meat and sauces, fresh-cut grasses, hot dogs and stacks of pancakes.” But underneath the perfection there are signs of rottenness. “I visit the public library. . . and then I write aggressive letters of extraordinary vividness and humor.” The narrator regularly writes letters of complaint to her neighbors. There are evidently standards that must be maintained.

Dear Mrs. Millet, This may seem a bit extreme. It may take more of your time than was previously calculated. . . Mrs. Millet, it’s time you adopt a practical approach to native plants, to the aesthetic and financial requirements of residential land use, to cutting down that spruce tree and considering the greater good. I mean to be frank, Mrs. Millet.

Dear Mr. Mayor, I suppose you expect me to begin with some shocking new discovery. I see your car parked on the street outside my house as I write this. Does that shock you Mr. Mayor? In particular, Mr. Mayor, the extraordinary discourse that you insist on forcing before me, it disturbs me. My own vehicle is washed clean. Do you get me?

Other letters are simply batty.

Dear Mrs. Sharp, I am one of the best letter writers in this town, if not the best. I was born here and never strayed. That’s a lie. No one was born here. I am a rugged individualist and a sage. Thank you for attending my party.

With all of the current interest in chatbots and ChatGPT, there are moments when Sprawl reads as if written by a chatbot that can’t quite get English down pat. There are strange word slippages, like “the new trend that was spatially interesting.” Or there is this sentence: “In the morning I look like pudding,” the narrator writes one day, “or I sound like a mosquito squeaking under a mattress, or I fuck like a secretary with her hands full of paper.”

There are moments when I think our narrator glimpses the nature of her claustrophobic environment and wonders what is beyond the paper-thin barriers that entrap her. “Is this fast trip through my own little strip of time my own? Am I on it?”

It’s like I can’t rest confident in the political circumstance of one small space, this one, or right outside the window, or across the street, or over by the train station. As if I’m delicate. As if I’m deserted. . . In the morning, over coffee and eggs, I’m exhorted to be an individual. In the afternoon we wash our cars. At night I’m restricted to a relatively confined social circle. The cat climbs in and out of empty boxes in the hall. I sleep with the window open and imagine.

But eventually Haywood, her husband, finally decides “that what we have is a kind of awkwardness worth saving.”

His systematic attempts to be a husband are my instructions for the next few hours. We move behind the couch where he presses his fingers into my neck. He puts his toes in my vagina. “Good God,” I cry. I lean against the wall. My face is probably magnificent.

The marriage seems to have been saved and our narrator goes off on a binge of letter-writing. She binds her letters to Lisle in “attractive blue ribbons” because “it might be that these letters are more satisfying to me than ordinary personal relationships.”

My reading of Sprawl is just one of many possible readings. There is a democracy to Dutton’s writing that opens up interpretations of practically any flavor, by which I mean that no one sentence is privileged above another. The chaotic quality that I mentioned earlier means that there really aren’t any subordinate sentences or key moments that direct the reader to the author’s intentions. This gives Sprawl a kind of flatness, so that it’s up to the reader to decide where the emphasis or drama lies or if there is any at all. Dutton’s goal is, in part, to estrange us from our own world and then abandon us. It’s up to us what we do there. We can put the book back on the shelf or give it to the library book sale or continue to stare in wonder at the words that construct Dutton’s marvelously twisted version of the universe.

©Laura Letinsky, Untitled # 54, from Hardly More Than Ever.

Dutton has spoken and written about the manner in which artist Laura Letinsky’s photographs assisted in the deeply visual world building that takes place in Sprawl. There are domestic scenes in the book which are literal transcriptions of Letinsky photographs from her book Hardly More Than Ever: Photographs 1997-2004 (Chicago: Renaissance Society, 2004). Last year, Dutton even wrote a small, beautifully illustrated book called A Picture Held Us Captive (Ithaca, NY: Image Text Ithaca Press, 2022), about ekphrastic writing, some of which detailed her experience using Letinsky’s images. “There’s a bizarre plasticity to them. Everything in this landscape seems about to collapse. Life feels staged and the stuff of life half rotten. The idea of home is suddenly suspect.” I found this connection between Letinsky and Dutton fascinating, but ultimately distracting. There’s simply no point for the general reader to be wondering if every still life description in Sprawl has its origins in a Letinsky photograph.

Danielle Dutton. A Picture Held Us Captive.

Still, Dutton’s short essay in A Picture Held Us Captive has much to say about a certain strain of contemporary fiction. “My experiences with visual art are so often what make the world strange for me, and it is when the world is strange that I am most compelled to write.” In her wide-ranging essay, Dutton references Lydia Davis, Eley Williams, Georges Perec, Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, John Keene, Nathalie Leger, and Ben Lerner as writers who have written novels or stories based on works of visual art. In reality, this could be a much longer list of writers.

I still remember the frisson I got when I first read Samuel Beckett’s Molloy more than half a century ago. The world was suddenly made strange and for the first time I could see and understand things that had previously made no sense to me. This is why, for me, the best literature is not that which makes me cozy and comfortable, but that which makes the world strange and gives me new eyes, new perspectives—literature like Danielle Dutton’s Sprawl.