Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

  Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin is a novel about two sisters caught between worlds—and replicates that experience for readers. The essential premise of the book is that sisters Lark and Robin (yes, really) have a tumultuous relationship with their mother Marianne, which drives Lark to study in the United States. Later, Robin follows and Lark acts as her substitute mother. Robin is a piano prodigy; Lark is a filmmaker. It does get more complicated than that, but those are the basics to keep in mind.

The novel has some moments that stand out as impactful, but I’ll return to those shortly.

First, I want to address two aspects of the book that I think don’t entirely work. For one, I can’t pinpoint whether it’s Lark’s voice or some other element, but the novel feels rather cold. I found it difficult to connect with the characters, particularly their mother Marianne. Lark offers very little sympathy to her mother and it’s hard to see past Lark’s narration and find the positives in Marianne for ourselves. The same applies for the other characters, too—it’s hard to tell whether they’re just unlikeable or whether Lark’s narration colours them so convincingly that they feel distant.

There are two elements in the dynamic between Lark and Marianne that I found edifying. Partway through the novel, Lark starts filming her mother for a one-on-one interview. The description of the filming sessions and Marianne’s openness show that brief glimmer into her that feels human. Later in the novel, Marianne has dementia and feels compelled to constantly clean. At the end of a tense interaction, Lark narrates, “She gave me a broom and together we swept away invisible dirt, wiped invisible cobwebs. Afterward we shared the pastries and drank the weak, cold tea she had made” (195). There’s something tender in that moment where both attend to an absence and have a shared vision of life that they generally don’t have. That tenderness seems to fade, though, when her mother passes. It lacks fanfare and even feeling, returning to a coldness that chills the novel.

The second issue is that I think the book lacks coherence. The focus of the novel is much harder to pinpoint than I implied in my opening paragraph. The book is a reasonably tight 272 pages in my edition, but it’s so jam-packed that it’s the longest short book I’ve read in a while. The first part reads like a bildungsroman of Lark setting out on her own and going to school. It’s Victorian-ish to start and we get a reasonably lengthy section of her learning about film and dating her first boy. Their relationship is annoying but well-developed; it felt like one of the more authentic and sincere elements of the book. Then there’s also a section about her horrible roommate, Robin arriving, and the roommate’s old cats dying while in the sisters’ care and the roommate’s reaction when she finds out. That, too, was a compelling moment that was reasonably rich in character development. From there, we get another lengthy section about Robin and Lark’s respective studies and dating lives; Robin becomes a piano prodigy that studies at Juilliard and then goes on to tour Europe before leaving her agent in the lurch and sending a postcard to Lark that reads “Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Robin goes back to her studies in film, working on her own, and apprentice-editing for an established artsy filmmaker. The descriptions of the films, I found, were compelling. The images they inspired for me felt rich and I could imagine engaging in film analysis for films of that sort. Later, we see a fraught relationship between the filmmaker and his daughter and his daughter and Lark. The filmmaker and Lark start dating; they stop dating; Lark wants a child; Lark can’t have a child, and there’s lengthy discussion of it. There’s a section where Marianne becomes senile and is clearly in decline—again, there’s a great moment, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. The weirdest thing is that Robin essentially starts a wolf sanctuary and she has a barn where all the stalls house broken pianos—again it feels a little bit Victorian (I think about the wolves peppered throughout Wuthering Heights and the pianos in the barns feels like a Gothic secret). Of course Robin becomes a surrogate for Lark. Oh, and there’s a part about nursing a wolf back to health.

To me, the book is trying to tell too many stories at once. The parts just don’t seem to fit together and instead it feels like a piecemeal approach. To be generous to Ohlin, I’m going to accept that it’s intentionally structured to mirror Lark’s filmic experience. Film distorts time—like in a film, Dual Citizens allows us to jump across years. Like film, we jump cut between topics. Filmmakers splice and juxtapose. The filmmakers in the novel also have an intense focus; one of Lark’s mentors is an ardent feminist whose views are given voice through the characters, and the other has an intense focus on slice-of-life moments and holds an intense zoom. That also felt like Ohlin’s approach. Consider, for example, this description of Lark’s mentor’s film Potato, “which was released two years later, but not widely seen. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is slow, densely composed, exquisite. Every shot shows how he labored over it, and this is perhaps part of the problem: his fingerprints are on every frame, urging the view, Look how beautiful this is” (104). I would argue that the structure of this novel is similar: it is slow and densely composed. It is, in some ways, laborious to read with its intense focus. The passage describing the film continues, “It’s as if you’re not allowed to see anything for yourself” (104), which I think is how Lark’s narration makes me feel: we’re offered judgment and we have to follow her perspective on the other characters in the book. The passage continues as follows: 

The other problem (besides the title, which encouraged bad behaviour among writers, unable to restrain themselves from headlines like Spud Flick a Dud) is the film’s level of abstraction. The tight composition focuses on the threshers, the planters, the rolling escalators in which the trembling potatoes are fed into the gaping maw of the processor, the camera so close to the equipment that it becomes difficult to tell what the machines are doing. The whole experience is aestheticized, and for all the nearness, there is no intimacy. (104)

I think that the novel does very much the same, though not to the level of abstraction. Ohlin does, however, keep intense focus on particular moments and details. The amount of time dedicated to Lark’s first relationship: is it necessary? I’m not sure, but the novel seems unable to look away and, “for all the nearness, there is no intimacy” (104).

Similarly, Lark’s own approach to filmmaking (and indeed life), is that she “gathered tidbits—things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed—and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them” (101). Dual Citizens embodies that piecemeal approach to storytelling. For Lark, “stitching a film together satisfied this collector’s itch perfectly, [her] magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest” (101). The book is a series of moments, but loosely joined.

When the plot does have a “twist,” I feel like it was obvious. For instance, when Robin disappears from her European tour with the note not to find her, I immediately suspected it was an issue with an unplanned pregnancy. Probably a hundred and fifty to two hundred pages later my suspicions were confirmed and rather than it being a moment of shock and pathos, my reaction was more…”well, yeah.” I just hoped for something a little more cohesive and a little more surprising. The book trailed too far into the quotidian without offering the sorts of philosophical explorations of minutiae that I find so compelling in other similar works.

Overall, Dual Citizens had a few charms and a couple of moments that felt like highlights, but as a coherent project it felt a little flat and cold. Ohlin’s writing style is certainly descriptive enough and has flashes of inspiration that elevate its status in the literary world—but I was just hoping for something with a little more force, a little more complete.

Nonetheless, happy reading!

Strange News from Another Star by Herman Hesse

  Herman Hesse was one of my first entry points into philosophical literature and I have fond memories of Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, and Demian among others. That said, it has been years—decades, even—since I’ve last picked up one of his books. After my lengthy hiatus, I’ve picked up Strange News from Another Star, a collection of short stories that was fine, but not as affecting as his more substantial works.      

        The collection revolves around a few key themes, including outlandish wishes, mystical journeys into the beyond, and the hidden significance of seemingly everyday phenomena. The tone reads very much like a book of fairytales where an objective and factual tone recounts details that are unrealistic. There are some stories that are more introspective in nature and narrated in first person. Whether inward- or outward-focused, the book reaches for the allegorical, the eternal, and the strange.

Two of the stories that were most engaging to me were “Augustus” and “Faldum”, both of which revolve around odd wishes. In the case of “Augustus,” a mother is granted the ability to make a wish for her son (the actual mechanics are thankfully never explained). In a panic, she makes the wish that everyone will love him. Augustus then follows a hedonistic and philandering path similar to that of Dorian Gray. He’s given the opportunity to make a wish of his own and starts to turn his path around. The premise works, even if it’s essentially just a “monkey’s paw” premise. “Faldum,” by contrast, involves wishes fulfilled. Everyone in this strange village is able to make a wish from a wandering merchant—and their wishes are instantly granted. It’s a little mysterious that they don’t all wish for something more ambitious. Most just ask for a modest sum of money and then go about their way. The wishes that matter are for those of two hermits. One wants nothing more than to talk to nobody and play his violin, so he ascends into the sky and is never seen again. The other hermit wishes to become a mountain—and does, literally. He’s a mountain for ages until many generations of people die and he erodes and then is given the chance to reunite with the music, essentially become music, alongside the violinist. It’s a strange, if engaging, concept.

“Faldum” also stands out in the collection due to the richness of its imagery. The whole opening sequence offers a frame narrative replete with description of the main character’s journey to Faldum. Several other stories have lush passages, including “A Dream Sequence” and “Iris.” I was surprised by how focused Hesse was on the details; I typically think of his writing as more broad strokes with more emphasis on philosophical exposition.

“A Dream Sequence” and “Flute Dream” were stories of less impact on me. They’re imagistic, symbolic, and mystical in nature, offering suggestions of deeper meaning. The challenge with stories like this (and dream sequences in general) is that their internal coherence is often lacking. We have to accept that the symbols have significance despite not having the same access to the writer’s inner states.

“Strange News from Another Star” and “Iris” are somewhat more memorable since they have a more clear focus. While maintaining some aspects of the dreamy free association of Hesse’s more esoteric works, there’s a little more narrative development. In “Strange News from Another Star,” the character goes in search of flowers in far and distant lands because nothing is worse than not adorning their dead with flowers—meanwhile, he arrives in lands full of war and death. “Iris,” meanwhile, follows a man who is drawn into the iris flower and falls in love with a woman named Iris, who refuses to marry him because he can’t commit to her spontaneous inclinations, favouring instead a life of the mind.

Hesse’s novels often revolve around duality. To my recollection, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game all revolve around the idea that the mind and the body exist in a challenging duality. There’s the implication that intellect and hedonism exist at opposite ends of a spectrum that struggle against one another within people. The same exploration happens in stories like “Iris” but the story isn’t quite as developed.

A few of the stories address the great beyond; there’s a common motif of crossing a threshold into the unknown and the conflation of death and open gates to the great beyond pop up as mutual metaphors. 

Overall, it was nice to revisit Hesse’s writing. The short stories are a quick entry point into some of the major themes in Hesse’s oeuvre. The lush descriptions are a delight, and I did find myself thinking as I read, particularly around which wishes I would make, given the opportunity, that would not end in disaster.

If you’re looking for an early entry point to Hesse, or if you’re a completionist of his oeuvre, Strange News from Another Star may be worth your while—but in my humble opinion, it would be better to read at least a few of his novels first.

Happy reading!

In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

        I am sometimes blessed with the rare pleasure of seeing a book I hadn’t previously heard of suddenly mentioned in wildly different contexts. It feels like encouragement from the fates to pick it up, a kind of organic process of magical discovery that even the best algorithms can’t replicate. This time, the universe led me to In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. I think my initial exposure to it was in Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, but there have been at least two or three other references or contexts (another book? the writing on an art gallery wall?) to Tanizaki’s philosophy on shadows.

Tanizaki is a true aesthete. He offers such lush, poetic descriptions of shadows but also how they manifest across different facets of Japanese culture. I myself am drawn to the alluring ambiguity of shadows, though Tanizaki also makes it a matter of national character which leads to some ideas that feel a little spurious.

I’ll start with some of the more engaging parts. Tanizaki reads almost like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes in that he provides focused commentary on oft-overlooked elements of our culture. For instance, in an early chapter we see Tanizaki discussing the elegance of Japanese toilets. He discusses their placement in fragrant groves, where people on the toilet get lost in meditation outdoors. Elegance, he says, is frigid. He sees toilets as a most aesthetic object, where that which is unsanitary becomes elegance and an opportunity to reflect on the beauties of nature, suggesting a connection between toilets and the haiku as a poetic form. 

There’s another chapter in which he discusses the difference between lacquered dishware and porcelain. In addition to the disdain he feels towards the clinking and scraping of porcelain utensils, he also talks about the infinite depths of a lacquered bowl. He talks about Japanese soup in such bowls that appear to reflect infinite depths. When you lift the bowl to your face, you look into the cloudy darkness of the soup and it stretches on forever against the lacquered finish. Passages like that reflect also the depths of Tanizaki’s sensuality and read as a poetic philosophy.

In another area, Tanizaki describes the brightness of paper and the darkness of ink and how the technology of writing developed around flecked and tinted paper vs. bright white. He describes how the way pens developed was rooted in the relationship between light and shadow and how those pens changed the way we communicate—how the characters of different languages are shaped, ultimately, by the darkness of ink and the tools to disperse it.

I also loved the way he philosophized about polishing silver. Essentially, Tanizaki feels distaste for the shine, preferring cloudiness and jade’s shadowy surface. He elevates the idea of grime. The oils on peoples’ hands, for example, give statues polish. Grime makes things glow. It’s a reversal of how we often think about polish. 

As a broader aesthetics, Tanizaki points to the necessity of darkness to illuminate that which it enshrouds. I think there’s a lot of merit to that idea and when I consider the role of darkness in some of my favourite artworks, there is something about shining shadows.

Where Tanizaki’s philosophy loses me a little bit is when he ties things back to national character or racial traits. There are a number of unsupported generalities about Western and Japanese character. Some of the claims are interesting points of contrast. For instance, he talks about the dense gardens in Japan relative to the plain manicured lawns of the West. He talks about how in Western culture ghosts are transparent while in Japan they are footless and dark. There are a number of more spurious claims, however. For instance, he suggests that the “yellow” faces (his word) and black hair of the Japanese led to changes in the development of their culture. He also argues that “Orientals” (again, his word) are content to find pleasure in how things are, while Westerners find pleasure in what things can be—hence why the West is so replete with artificial light. He talks about the way bright lights produce heat—and don’t even get him started on the air conditioned nightmare that has taken over that renders all heating artificial.

There’s a lot to like about this sensual aesthetic philosophy. The series of short chapters and vignettes offers focused insight into different aspects of culture, and I really liked that level of phenomenological exploration. I read it with a grain of salt; I’m not sure how I would have received the book when it was originally published in 1933, but in 2026 a lot of the racial and cultural generalizations feel either dated or incomplete. I imagine, too, that with cultural influences being more widely available globally, some of the distinctions that might have previously existed are no longer as pronounced as they might have been.

If you’re also a fan of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, this book captures that same deep consideration of phenomena and bridges the worlds poetics and philosophy. It’s worth the hour or two it will take to read—despite all the shadows, it may prove illuminating.

Happy reading!