The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

        I think what I dislike about Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director is precisely what makes it work. At its core is a set of moral questions about oppressive rule, complicity, guilt, and the ethical status of art. Within the framework of historical fiction, Kehlmann explores the life and work of G. W. Pabst, real-world Austrian director of The Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and, under Nazi rule, The Comedians, Paracelsus, and The Molander Case—a film that was never released, lost when the Soviets came to liberate Prague, and a large focus of Kehlmann’s novel, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

There’s something enchanting about stories around lost media and the possibility of what might have been. At the outset of the book, World War II hasn’t started yet but the antisemitic context is well underway. Pabst has an idea for a film in which a group of people from different walks of life are on a boat when war is announced. The ship descends into madness; the passengers hurt one another, torture one another, and at the climax of the film it is revealed that the announcement of war was false, an illusion. Slowly, a man starts to play an old song on the piano and the group returns to normal, as if the previous hours had never happened. It’s a compelling premise that Pabst pitches unsuccessfully several times and seems to reflect his concern with a society that ignores its collective trauma with the illusion of art. By the end of the book,  Pabst couldn’t possibly conceive of the idea.

Essentially, Kehlmann’s novel shows us that story through a glass, darkly. One of Kehlmann’s strengths is switching the focal point strategically to give us perspective for the plot’s effect on his characters. There’s a certain filmic sensibility switching between characters, predominantly showing us Pabst, but also switching to his infant son’s point of view as we return to Austria, Pabst’s wife Trude at her book club, his dementia-ridden mother in her sanatorium, and flash forwards where we hear directly from Pabst’s assistant Franz Wilzek. There’s one passage about Jakob, the son, enjoying art class. Kehlmann describes how Jakob breaks down the whole into pieces: “The trick is to look at a thing as if it weren’t a thing and as if you didn’t know what it was” (119). He then describes the art process as “a collection of surfaces” where “white and black” are at play. This cubist abstraction has a depersonalizing effect, and indeed Jakob becomes a Nazi presumably by the same process. Leaping between these characters has a disorienting effect, particularly at the start of the novel, but aids in creating the ‘fog of war’ effect to obscure the implications of Kehlmann’s story beats. At the same time, it gives us a hint to their full characters rather than as just “white and black” playing on surfaces.

For some additional context, I’ve been reading the shortlisted books for the International Booker Prize 2026. Of the three I’ve read so far, The Director is a more conventional novel, driven by its story and cast of characters. While less experimental in its form, it still creates a reasonably compelling narrative, even if there’s a pervasive unsettling ambiguity.

Essentially, the book explores the viability and human cost of art produced under a fascist, totalitarian regime and the ways in which people are rendered complicit. Kehlmann reminds us several times throughout that filmmaking requires a team—lighting, camerawork, actors, extras, a director, production, distribution, and so on. At least two or three times, Pabst talks about the ‘rules’ of editing, which he prides himself in. One motion must always follow another. If we see a car drive off left, the next shot needs to start with a motion from right to left. There’s a sense of coherence in his perspective of editing, but more sinisterly a sense of inevitability. The idea that one motion must follow another is strangely close to the idea of people just following orders, of getting swept up in small concessions to Nazism and by necessity escalating to unimaginable atrocities. Perhaps it’s for these reasons that I had a Freudian slip more than once where I called The Director, mistakenly, The Dictator. At the end of the book, Pabst and his wife are examining a cave painting that depicts violent acts seemingly under the direction of a being whose head is comprised of red speckles and a set of eyes. Following Pabst’s rule for editing that the juxtaposition of images necessarily creates a resonance, the couple then discusses their old Nazi groundskeeper and suggest that it wasn’t Hitler or Goebbels who ruled, but men like their groundskeeper. It seems to me another statement on the ‘banality of evil’ as popularized by Hannah Arendt.

But it gets more complex. More ambiguous.

At the beginning of the novel, Pabst is living in Hollywood but is having trouble getting work as a director, relegated to terrible titles. He is called back to Austria to care for his ailing mother (although this ‘excuse’ is called into question by several others—why did he bring his whole family, including his son, for example?) and then remains because he’s injured on the eve of their departure at the hands of their groundskeeper Jerzabek (but was he? His wife denies that Jerzabek pulled the ladder from under him and that he was injured at his own hands). His motivations are unclear, but then Pabst is ‘coerced’ into the Propaganda Minister’s office under the premise that he can have great film projects that are ‘art’ and ‘not political.’ The scene is compelling, funny, and disturbing because the conversion is rooted in what cannot be said openly. Pabst is turning down the opportunity (indeed, he had previous run off and threatened to hit a Nazi that approached him in Hollywood about making films), but he’s not allowed to say no. The Minister gives Pabst the words to use to maintain decorum and avoid the threat underlying the conversation: this Communist, left-wing director is being offered the opportunity to work at making films for Germany or be sent to a concentration camp. The Minister has asked him there, but insists that Pabst asked for the meeting. Pabst tries to say his health reasons are preventing him from making films; the Minister says that Pabst is there to apologize for making Communist propaganda, being sympathetic to Jews, and so on. The Minister says he’s “unforgivable,” but here he is being forgiven all while being coerced into saying he’s sorry. A collective illusion.

As a brief aside, there’s a great scene that takes place in the sanatorium after Pabst’s mother has been placed there. She is genuinely suffering from dimentia, often mistaking her son for her husband and her grandson for her son. She starts saying some things that could be construed as being against the party and it’s revealed at the end of the chapter that many of the elderly there are able to get away with things because they’re seen as infirm. One of her fellow patients tells her privately, “We’re safe here, our confusion is tolerated, but you musn’t take that for granted” (172). Essentially, the elderly are able to escape the collective illusion: “I had to do a great deal to be allowed here. Outside they would have come for me long ago. But no one is looking here. After all, we’re very old. Our brains are fragile. Thankfully, we are the most uninteresting people” (172). The chapter ends with their delusions running together: for the man, intentionally, for Erika Pabst, genuine—it’s an open question as to which is better.

The most challenging part of the text is when Pabst is working on his final, lost film The Molander Case. Midway through the book, we see Trude at her book club, where they always read bland, sensationalized novels by the same Nazi author every time. Eventually, Pabst is enlisted to make the film adaptation of the novel. One of the things that perplexes me is how and whether he resists Nazi rule via the film. For example, he casts the same actor as the ‘good’ prosecutor and the ‘bad’ prosecutor—giving direction to act, essentially, like a Nazi official in one of the roles. It seems to be implied that Pabst recuts and edits the film to disrupt the original story and part of me thinks that casting the actor in a villainous Nazi-coded role would allow him to engage in commentary. When the author of the original work storms in, demanding to see the film (before it’s even cut), he sees one minute before getting into a rage and saying that he’ll have the director sent to the camps. Given that he’s a staunch Nazi, it feels like a moment where Pabst is onto something subversive—he even comments something to that effect; the more the author hates it, Pabst says, the more likely it is that they’re onto something really special. In one part of the film, Pabst uses presumably Jewish extras in a crowd scene in which people are watching a virtuoso violinist play, somewhat reminiscent of the film Pabst had earlier proposed. Pabst has some of the extras do horrific rictuses. For instance, one of them is instructed to bite her lips harder and harder until she bleeds. He says he’s going to intersperse the images for a second into the crowd shots. When his assistant says nobody will see it, Pabst says that’s part of the point—there’s just enough to make them doubt, to make them think about what they saw. It feels like he’s up to something subversive, like he’s trying to prove Walter Benjamin’s observation that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The artistry of the violin is undercut by the horror we barely see.

So, there are lots of seeming virtues for the film. Pabst even defends the film, telling his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist” (270). Years ago, I remember seeing an interview with Chris Hannah that bad political contexts are good for art—it’s not worth the cost. Here, Pabst is committed to making his masterpiece in spite of, or perhaps within the context of, totalitarianism—but he does seem to be trying to do something good.

But.

But.

At the opening of the book, we are witness to a talk show where a confused man is interviewed about being Pabst’s assistant. The talk show host starts asking about The Molander Case and the assistant, whom we know a little better by the end of the book, starts protesting that the film was never shot. He’s under the pressure of the surveillance:

“I look at the screen. See myself looking off somewhere—of course, the monitor isn’t the camera, you have to look into the camera to see yourself looking out from the monitor, except then you obviously can’t see yourself because you’re looking into the camera, not at the monitor. And now the monitor, even though it’s showing me, is showing something else at the same time, and to avoid seeing it, I close my eyes, but that doesn’t help, and I still see them: black-and-white people in a concert all. From high above I’m looking down on them, as if I were flying, a crystal chandelier is shining brightly, I’m sitting next to the camera on the arm of a long crane. They’re all facing forward, because they’re not allowed to look up” (13-14).

This early moment points to the disjointed nature of perspective. He’s trying to see himself, but he can only see himself from the angle of the camera. He never gets a full perspective of himself, and in the latter half of the passage we see his compulsion towards repression. He’s trying to avoid seeing what he can see and he’s taken back to the filming of The Molander Case, which he pretends was never shot. It’s because the movie, for all its seeming good intentions, is tainted by its context.

Before Pabst starts filming The Molander Case, he’s working on another project produced by, if I remember correctly, Leni Reifenstahl. It’s a difficult shoot. It turns out that the extras for the film are brought in from Maxglan—a concentration camp for Sinti and Roma people as a stop en route to Auschwitz. When filming, Pabst makes a comment about one of the extras, more or less, saying that he looked like he’d experienced the traumas of life and that’s what he wanted from the actors. When we get the reveal of where these extras are from, Pabst can’t stop ruminating on the comments he made, haunted by the implications.

So, it makes it harder to justify his change of heart when filming The Molander Case. Pabst is placed in an impossible position where he has to finish the film within three days, but the extras can no longer make it. To get a massive crowd shot, he brings in, presumably, inmates from a concentration camp. It’s complicated because it feels like maybe it’s meant to make a statement, especially with the interspersed shots of their suffering (or is it meant to suggest they are barbarous?!), but the move is exploitative. Sickening. Pabst’s assistant Franz is particularly affected; he sees his old pediatrician, one of the inmates. It’s the most obvious example of Pabst making art on the back of the most inhumane conditions possible and really casts a shadow on his project. The shroud of ambiguity is also there; I had the impression that maybe those extras were all killed in a fire immediately after the filming—I think there’s description of the sky blackening. It’s not definitive. Worse, Franz is devastated and when he tries to talk about it with Pabst, the director tells him he’s mistaken and that it was all soldiers who had been brought in.

The final turn of the book is even more complex. We see Pabst after the war, completely devastated and adrift after his film reels were mistakenly swapped for an identical bag of horseshoes. His wife is making a film that parallels them and shows, actually, a little bit of emotional nuance. Trude can’t forgive him for what he’s done—everything else, maybe, but not for bringing their son with them. She is haunted by his enthusiasm for joining the Hitler Youth and has long ago stopped loving Pabst. Pabst never saw his film again—but there’s a final twist. In the concluding chapter of the book, we return to Franz, now infirm and struggling with his memory (but how much of our memory is unintentional, the book asks, and how much of our memory is edited like a film?). It is revealed that Franz actually did have the reels returned to him from the horseshoe man but never came forward to give the film back to Pabst, despite his decrepitude. He also publicly denies the film ever existed before returning home and stashing it away in a closet. The fact that he refuses to acknowledge the film and operate in a sense of denial causes some ethical quandaries, especially because it’s not as though he destroyed it. He’s hoarding it, never to be seen.

The book is a challenge to our ethics. It makes us think about how complicit we are in the creation and enjoyment of art that’s built on the lives of others. It’s a consideration of our role within a bigger system. The ambiguous ethical position is frustrating, but important. For example, one of the chapters refers to how book critics no longer exist—only art appreciators. They are great at describing books and films, but they do not offer judgment, even positive judgment. You can’t call someone a good actor because that implies the existence of bad actors, or the possibility of a bad actor. Kehlmann clearly implies that we ought not be so passive, but also that the lines of involvement are often hard to grasp in the moment. There are three moments in the text where Franz experiences or remembers his pediatrician talking to him. The book ends on a reprise of their conversation: “Then the doctor would come. ‘Franzl, are we sick?’ His cool hand on my forehead. And then I thought, he’s not sick, Dr. Sämann, so why does he say we? Only I am sick” (331). This idea that we are all implicated together is what makes this novel so haunting, so perplexing.

One passage I see as critical is the description of the director as a profession. It encapsulates so much of how collective guilt functions. Pabst narrates:

“Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director” (64-65). 

The passage has a strange distancing effect. On the one hand, the director is seen as having created nothing. In that sense, perhaps Pabst is devoid of culpability. He has the plausible deniability that it’s other people causing the harm, not him. This would all happen without him. In a twisted vision of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, we see that all of the agents capable of independence except the director. The idea that artists can operate independently, but the director requires collaboration. He’s necessary and unnecessary at the same time, necessary only because of a collective illusion, a collective belief that a director is guiding all of them. It recalls the scene in which Pabst and Trude recognize that Hitler and Goebbels didn’t have the power: it was their groundskeeper. It’s hard not to see these positions as being mirror images of one another.

I’ll admit that, so far, this isn’t my favourite book in the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist, but it does give me a lot to think about, or perhaps more appropriately, more to be haunted by. There are some pretty clear parallels to our current situation when it comes to injustice, guilt, collective responsibility, and the awful origins of great art. It’s worth the read, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Happy reading!

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

        I’ve heard the hype around Ottessa Moshfegh for a few years as a new voice for the messy woman trope, hyped up in particular by both BookTok and my students but validated by some of my esteemed readerly friends. I was very kindly gifted Death in Her Hands as my introduction to her oeuvre. I’m told it’s her worst work, but even so I found it a really interesting project.

The book starts with a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” A compelling opening. Ripe for an unfolding murder mystery. But instead Moshfegh draws from and subverts the mystery genre in equal measure to a really interesting effect.

The investigation reads more like a dream sequence that would feel at home in a Murakami novel—or more accurately, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the central character is perpetually waylaid by half-formed plots and doubtful illusions. Each step of the journey—or in this case the investigation—seems to be interrupted before reaching completion, never quite circling back into coherence. A vital clue is found only to be interrupted by her dog going missing; the quest for a missing dog is interrupted by a fainting spell, and so on. From the first pages of the book I trained myself to expect irresolution—and that is the best mindset to go in with; I don’t expect anyone who wants a whodunnit will close this book with a sigh of satisfaction.

That’s because Death in Her Hands is largely a book of possibility. At the level of the word, of the sentence, events are framed in the conditional while perpetually denying resolution. Consider this passage as emblematic of what the book achieves; I’ll take the liberty of bolding the words that point towards equivocation:

If any of them knew Magda, if they cared about her, they hadn’t noticed she’d been gone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Maybe she’d gone out, with Blake, I supposed, and they had gotten in some trouble. [...] What nerve he had, leaving Magda’s body all alone. He must have been involved somehow. I wasn’t an expert in crime, but I knew this much: Black was a suspect. He had contact with Magda’s dead body. He knew something. It wasn’t me. His denial only made him seem scared and paranoid. And if I knew anything about paranoia, it was that it sprang from guilt and regret. Always. I’d seen it clear as day in Walter when we were having our troubles. “You’re crazy,” guilty people say. They try to dismiss your inquiries. “You’re paranoic,” Walter insisted. Guilty people will try to divert your attention. “Vee vere just talkink! I vas just helping her!” he said. Nobody will ever find her. Blake was guilty of something, whether of murder or neglect or stupidity, I didn’t know yet. If there were any actions to be taken, the first would be to find that boy. I had little to go on. But then again, the town was small. He was literate, that Blake. I knew that at least. And he had enough common sense to know if someone was alive or not. He must have felt Magda’s wrist or throat. I wondered how long he’d waited, wishing or not wishing for her heart to beat. (62)

Look at the language here: “if”s, “or”s, “maybe”s, and if we’re feeling generous the speculative “must have.” There’s a vagueness and hedging: “I wasn’t an expert,” “I didn’t know yet,” “I had little to go on,” or “then again.” The mist of uncertainty permeates the novel.

As the story progresses, the central character, 70 year old Vesta Gul becomes a detective, using the search engine Ask Jeeves (RIP) at the library to search for tips on solving murders and writing detective stories. It’s somewhat comic, this elderly woman playing detective, but there’s a surreal and metafictional quality to the work. For example, in the lengthy passage I quoted above, she notes that “paranoia [...] sprang from guilt and regret” (62). In this section, she’s alluding to her husband’s adultery, which is later shown to be quite extensive. His gaslighting seems to be a contributing factor to her paranoia. Elsewhere, she also discusses how he was so good at solving murder mysteries and said how obvious the solutions were if you knew the conventions—the culprit was always the person just west of center. With these details, I myself was sprung into a paranoiac mentality: is Vesta gaslighting us and she really knows who killed Magda. Is her husband himself the person just west of center, guilty of taking the life of one of his student devotees? 

The surrealism of the text is predominantly a result of Vesta’s strange relationship to narrative. Throughout the book, Vesta develops theories of who is involved in the mystery, developing a list of suspects from around town. She invents Blake, the young man who was trying to help the rebellious (but vulnerable) Magda. Magda ends up renting a room in Shirley’s house as a favour but Magda also works a job caring for an old man and maybe being romantically involved with his son and at least one other abusive man. It’s the kind of network of associations that would feel like Laura Palmer’s in Twin Peaks. The strange part, though, is that Vesta encounters these people as if they are real. In following Blake’s tracks, she finds a poem in William Blake’s poetry that has been underlined in a library book and then uses that to guide her. When a woman locks her car keys inside her car and asks Vesta for help, Vesta stumbles into the Shirley she invented. The creep at the gas station has the same name as the one she invented for one of her creeps. The coincidences abound, so much so that it can’t possibly be true. It’s as though Vesta enters in and out of the narrative she herself invented and it brings doubt as to whether any of this is real.

As a brief aside, I can’t help but notice that Vesta Gul continually corrects people on her name throughout the book. It is specifically not said as Vesta Gool but as Vesta Gul. Either way, it has an odd resonance with the word “vestibule” and I can’t help but feel that the central character of Death In Her Hands is in a similar kind of liminal space, both in- and out- of the stories she enters. When she’s filling in character sheets for the people in her mystery story (she was told she needs a list of suspects), she invents a “ghoul” for the story (again, oddly resonant with her name—implicating her, perhaps, in her own story). When she writes the name though, the ‘u’ and the ‘l’ blend together into a ghod combo and thereafter she names the unseen shadowy monster in the story as Ghod. Ghod exerts agency and chaos into her story—it’s only later that she encounters a police officer and equates Ghod with the law. 

The encounters Vesta has with other characters often reads as stilted and awkward, which adds to the atmospheric oddity of the text. For example, at one point, Vesta discovers that her car won’t start and when she calls a repairman she discovers her wires have been cut. The repairman suggests maybe she cut her own wires. The conversation orbits the possibility of repair before the repairman gets metaphysical. She asks, “can you fix it?” and he says, “It can’t be fixed. What you have here is irreparable damage. Don’t you know there is no life after death? You know this it, don’t you? You aren’t going anywhere” (198). It seems to me a leap that no real person would make at that moment. As they continue their conversation, Vesta suggests she’ll walk if she has to and he responds with the ominous, “All I can say is that when you walk into that forest, that forest is all you’ll see” (198). It’s the kind of aphoristic line that could be translated into the Twin Peaks red room. There’s an uncomfortable communion between Vesta and her townsfolk. Vesta approaches a house looking for her dog and stumbles upon a death party for a woman who is not seeking cancer treatment and has invited her friends to gather for a last hoorah. The two talk about being neighbors (everybody mentions that Vesta lives on “the old Girl Scout camp”) and they share memories. The woman says she went there when she was little and had intended to buy it. She refers to the ghost story that circulated about it. Vesta is incredulous: “‘Ghost story?’ I said. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cackle” (207). The both of them seem to be ghosts themselves, in that liminal space between life and death. The woman says, “Ghod told us your name once. What was it again? He’ll be here later. We’ve cast him as the lead investigator with instructions to come dressed as Sherlock Holmes. But he’ll probably show up in his uniform, as always” (207). There are layers of fiction here: Vesta has invented the character Ghod, embodied him in the police officer, and now a new character is referring to him in the same way despite there being no way she would have that knowledge. Within this fiction, the woman is hosting a party in which everyone comes in disguise: a murder mystery party is its own fiction within the fiction.

There are several other motifs that play into this idea of guiding fictions. Early in the book we’re introduced to Pastor Jimmy, a man with a radio show offering religious guidance. Vesta listens to his fire and brimstone advice and internalizes his voice. She calls in to the show and struggles to express herself but Pastor Jimmy attempts some guidance; later, when she talks to the repairman later on, he reveals that Pastor Jimmy has been dead for years and that all the shows are reruns (198). Pastor Jimmy is presented as an illusion responsive to the inner workings of Vesta’s imagination. When her dog Charlie goes missing, Vesta considers enlisting (the maybe fictional) Shirley’s help and then the police’s help. From there, she imagines a whole scenario and uses it as justification for not following up. Again, the sentences switch to the conditional tense:

But I had no phone, and involving Shirley would only complicate things. I could imagine the kind of laughter I’d get if I called the police.
“Crazy old lady, the old Girl Scout, her dog went missing,” they’d say around the station.
“Wonder where he went.”
“Dumb old mutt.”
“Probably ran away. Who’d want to stick around with that old hag, that monster, that witch? Hansel and Gretel, is that the story? The crazy old hag who lived alone in the woods? Or am I thinking of Goldilocks? Whatever it is, she’s a bitch, that’s for sure.”
Brutes, those cops were, talking about me that way. Didn’t they know I’d been the wife of a scientist? Didn’t they know I’d worn the most elegant silk blend dresses, gone to dinners at the university? The wife of a state senator had complimented me on my hairdo. They’d printed my picture in the paper a few times. I’d sung in a chorus at college. I’d studied Japanese calligraphy. (187)

Vesta imagines what they would say. Even when she imagines what they say, even in her imagination they’re uncertain: the dog “probably” ran away. The way Vesta imagines herself in the eyes of others is pretty critical. She characterizes herself as the monster of a fairy tale before trying to counteract it with who she actually was. Also worth noting, though, is how often these assessments are all phrased as questions.

In fact, one of the novel’s key questions is that of identity. Who is Vesta? Who is Magda? Are any of these people actually people? Early in the text, Vesta narrates that “It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody” (17). She’s referring to the note she found, but there’s a doubling here. She continues to say that “there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank.” (17). She corrects people on her name “to avoid confusion.” There’s a motif of names and their implications—even her dog is named Charlie so that “when we were feeling regal, [she]’d call him Charles” (17). 

A key aspect of the book is Vesta’s relationship with her dog. Her dog is somewhat emblematic of her own experiences. One day her dog Charlie brings her a dead bird. Despite an apparent disjointedness, there’s a clear parallel here. Death is brought to Vesta in the form of a note, but also in the form of a bird. Death is dropped at her feet: “That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths” (15). Vesta and Charlie are aligned through a compulsion to retrieve a dead thing. She recognizes the danger for Charlie, but ignores the danger for herself. She doesn’t seem to recognize her own compulsion even in the same moment: “I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself” (15). She also reflects on Charlie’s origin. She explains how Charlie was discovered two months ago in black duffel bag on the riverbank and how he was the only one of the litter that survived. She narrates, “I spent a minute piecing that together” (17). Vesta stitches reality into place. “From then on,” she says, “I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-coloured pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine” (17). She recreates the moment, a revisionist moment where she can reforge her relationship with Charlie and with her sense of self.

If I were to sum up the book’s core motifs, it’s about identity, imagination, paranoia, death, storytelling, and so on. In one moment, Vesta loads Charlie into the car and decides not to go lock her cabin door: “No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it?” (48). Vesta recognizes that suspicion invites danger—but can’t help herself but feel that suspicion everywhere she goes. She brings danger to herself while recognizing that if you “keep the imagination soft and happy, [...] only good things will come” (48). If this mystery is all a matter of perspective, Vesta might project a better outcome with a shift in her mindset. In that passage, she proceeds to list all the dead things out in the woods, starting with Magda and then working towards mice and rabbits that are never found and none of them were ever buried. “What’s so wrong about that?” she asks herself, “Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself” (48). There’s a strange distancing taking place where Vesta tries to downplay the death of a human being. Yet, she returns. She obsesses. She tries to find a solution that will bring coherence to this death.

Death In Her Hands is a dream sequence—perhaps more accurately described as a nightmare—where dream logic guides us through a series of detours. It creates an atmosphere of suspension and paranoia where not even Vesta is above suspicion. It’s worth noting that her beloved dog becomes terrified of her after it returns from being missing. The line between the imagined and the real blurs, leading to an irresolution that would not satisfy many readers, though it worked for me. The novel reads as almost an anti-mystery. The note points to a body, but ultimately we’re left without corpus delicti. As much as Vesta follows the rules, the clues never add up. So here we are. Adrift.

Happy reading!

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

        File On Earth as It Is Beneath under “intense short novels.” Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2026, Ana Paula Maia and translator Padma Viswanathan present the bleak final days of a penal colony isolated from the rest of the world and seemingly forgotten completely. At the opening of the novel, the remaining prisoners can be counted essentially on one hand and as the novel progresses we learn more about the root cause of their dwindling numbers: the warden of the penal colony, a Colonel Kurtz type named Melquíades who hunts prisoners for sport under the guise of giving them the “opportunity” to escape. The colony is beyond all hope and even Melquíades and the remaining guard, Taborda, know it.

        The backdrop of the novel is that the inspector will soon be paying a visit—and several of the colony’s residents see it as a portent of their doom: how could his inspection lead to anything but? The paranoiac atmosphere of the novel is finely wrought, partially because we see each of the residents in isolation and in communion with one another. Bronco Gil, arguably the main character, has plans of escape and advertises those to a trustworthy fellow inmate who later drugs him to disrupt the plan. When Melquíades goes missing, Taborda holes up in a tower with a gun, fearing an uprising from the remaining three prisoners. None of the prisoners can leave the compound, knowing that their ankle monitors double as bombs that will detonate once they reach a certain distance. It’s an oppressive atmosphere rendered all the more ominous as the prisoners dig graves for their fallen comrades—only to find more graves, unspeakable horrors held within boxes mistaken for treasure chests.

        Bronco Gil reflects on his escape plan and he remembers that they had been preparing soil for planting: “The harsh sun burned his brown skin as, with quiet concentration, he dug like someone searching for a secret” (45). Maia then describes in rich detail him finding a human skull and eventually the whole skeleton, bound at the wrists and ankles. He continually discovered more bounds buried in this way: skeletons “of the enslaved, who had lived and died here” (45). The existential reflection kicks in: “Bronco wondered who knew what had happened inside these walls. He understood that he hadn’t been sent here to serve out his sentence but rather to be executed” (45). The ominous grounds reflects Melquíades’ “hunting prisoners, applying what he called his socio-educational measures” (45). Maia’s characterization of the central villain is compelling; Taborda explains that his boss “had gone crazy in recent months, between confinement, isolation and having to live alongside the evil inside every man in this place” (45). So much of the tension in the early section of the book is the knowledge that “Melquíades will never let anyone leave, not even Taborda, and, in the end, he’ll take his own life too. He could never live in society again; he’s eaten away by the system he defends” (45). It’s reminiscent of some of literature’s most unhinged villains—Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh or, as I mentioned, Colonel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. There’s also a layer to it that implies a historical trauma. There is a lot of speculation about the land, but it’s implied that it was the site of mass disappearance and murder, a place of enslavement, torture, and killing. It’s like a haunted house narrative, a story of demonic possession at the hands of history. Given the South American flare of the story, it also feels like an allusive commentary on their difficult histories.

        The interaction between the characters drives the tension, and Maia’s experience as a screenwriter really shines through. For example, we’re given the backstory for how Bronco Gil arrived in prison. Serving as a naive hitman-for-hire, he’s paid to get revenge on a man who killed a woman’s loved one. Ironically, she coaxes two thousand dollars from the man to help care for her sick child—which she then uses to pay for the hit on him. Clean. When Bronco Gil arrives to kill him, there’s a quiet moment where the man asks if he can feed his cats first, which Bronco Gil allows. They then end up in conversation about why the man is being killed, who paid for it, and so on. The tension of the scene is excellent.

        Later in the novel, the inspector Heitor does arrive but Taborda is the one providing the tour. Heitor is asking questions about the colony’s operation that Taborda and the inmates are answering evasively. It’s an interesting moment where the dynamic of the novel shifts: no longer is Taborda a functionary for Melquíades; no longer is Taborda a paranoiac hiding in a tower from the prisoners—Taborda and the inmates form a strange allegiance to one another, covering up for one another’s failings in the hope of making their way through the inspection. It’s comic—nearly a Weekend at Bernie’s type farce—but equally tense. Heitor is asking where Melquíades has gone (“oh, he sent his resignation but the mail must never have gotten there…”), why the colony has dropped from over forty prisoners to under five (“well, there was the outbreak…”), well where were the sick sent (“Melquíades is the only one who had the records, but he sent them to various hospitals…”). On Earth As It Is Beneath shows how easily farce can tip into suspense.

        Taborda’s mental well-being, like the other characters, decays when strained. Early in the book, the prisoners are burying one of their fallen comrades; they come across a box that has horrors within it that make them physically sick and it is largely left as a mystery for the audience what has made this more horrible than their other daily experiences. When Taborda is forced to give Heitor a tour of the colony, Taborda gives up the ruse and reveals that baby skeletons are buried all throughout the colony’s land—that the horror existed long before them and has continued to descend into madness. When Heitor returns to the kitchen, the cook Valdênio prepares the inspector a coffee. Heitor promises the old man that he’ll get them out of prison by the end of the day, but he wants to know the mysterious identity of the prisoner they’re keeping in solitary confinement. When Valdênio reveals that it’s Melquíades, Heitor is astonished. “Why didn’t you all tell who he was?” Heitor asks, and Valdênio responds, “Because we wanted to kill him and spare you” (88). The moment is tense—and by coincidence that statement ends the page. For a moment, it seems like they might kill the inspector, too, to save their skins and not reveal the truth. I’ll leave you to sit in that suspense.

        For such a short novel, it’s action-packed and the twists were superb. Maia outlines Melquíades’ ritual of hunting prisoners. He’ll unclip them both from their bomb anklets and give them thirty seconds to run, after which he hunts them down and murders them. Nobody has ever escaped—hence why Bronco Gil has developed a whole plan about killing Melquíades, stealing his jeep, cutting off his own foot, and driving as far as he can. At one point, though, Melquíades sets two prisoners free and one legitimately escapes. When Melquíades tracks him down, the prisoner is able to knock him out. Later, in a jaw-dropping moment, Melquíades returns to camp dressed in a prisoner’s uniform. The tension of not knowing what he’ll do is expertly delivered; we’ve seen Melquíades act erratically—murderously—and so to see him stumble back into the prison creates an excellent sense of terror, which is undercut by irony.

        In fact, the whole book is fueled with irony. I’ll be spoiling the ending in this paragraph, so feel free to jump ahead. The irony of the ending feels allegorical in nature. Bronco Gil escapes with Valdênio and as they reach the limits of the compound, Valdênio chooses to leave first—he’s old, there’s nothing left for him, etc. He doesn’t explode. The bombs on their ankle monitors were a lie and they might have escaped at any time. In addition to that irony, Bronco Gil is picked up as a hitchhiker and offered a job. The man offering him the job knows full well he was a criminal sent to this Kafka-esque prison (the prisoners are never told why they, of all criminals, were selected for this particular placement.) The man sees Bronco Gil’s ability to survive and escape as an asset, ignoring his criminal past—he will be an asset at the slaughterhouse (a slaughterhouse of all things—think of the parallels!). The man reveals that everyone knows the prison is a horrific place and that nobody ever leaves that hell. Everyone knows that convicts go in and never come out, but nobody seems to really question it or know the specifics. There’s meaning here well worth discussing; I’d love to teach this book to see what people come up with.

        Similarly, Maia has a great sense of imagery and symbolism. The description of the setting is delivered with rich detail and there’s a bit of symbolism that would fit right in with Lord of the Flies: Melquíades collects boar heads that Bronco Gil has killed for him and has them taxidermied—but there are no suitable eyes to be found anywhere (nobody is able to boar witness…with apologies to the concept of language). Melquíades reflects, “It’ll take me a while to get used to those eyes being empty, but apart from that, it’s perfect” (22). The fact that he, too, is a lifeless, soulless entity might reveal some of his own affinities—and fear of—the eyeless boar.

        On Earth As It Is Beneath is a really compelling narrative. The plot and tension drives the work, but it’s elevated beyond an action-thriller by Maia’s deft hand with imagery, symbolism, characterization, and philosophy. There’s enough secrecy and paranoia in the book to compel readers onward and the interactions between the characters really build the suspense that takes the comic and returns it with a rictus visage. It was a great experience—and easily readable within a day for an added bonus.

        Happy reading!