Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

    In the early pages of Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, there’s a lovely passage about the constellation of insect corpses that form on the narrator’s windshield. It’s a moment of poetry in an otherwise prosaic work and the constellation speaks to the novel as a whole: bursts in largely random order tossed into the reader’s line of vision. The similarities are sometimes clear, otherwise too disconnected to form a coherent whole.

    If you’re unfamiliar with Kaufman’s writing, it’s likely because you know him for his film projects: he wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He directed Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I have thoroughly enjoyed his film projects and admired their overreaching quality while they nonetheless remain grounded in the emotional affectations of their characters.

    Antkind takes its cues from Kaufman’s films—it has layers like a sprawling nesting doll. Where Synecdoche, New York proliferates characters imitating characters imitating characters back to their originary source, Antkind takes things a step further by suggesting that time is simultaneous, each moment contained within another. By extension,the future can be deducted from the present and the future can reach into the past to alter it. Like the characters in this book, though, I’m getting ahead of myself. 

    The novel focuses on B. Rosenberger, a film critic who has written on every obscure subject there is and who boasts a 7-viewing process when deciphering films. While on assignment, Rosenberger meets a man named Ingo Cutbirth, whom he discovers is an amateur filmmaker. Cutbirth has taken ninety years of his life to produce a single film, the run time of which is an entire three months (but don’t worry, he has built in nap and bathroom breaks!). Rosenberger commits to viewing the film and quickly decides it’s a masterpiece. While Rosenberger is viewing the film, Cutbirth dies and Rosenberger starts heading back home with the film intent on creating his legacy by analyzing, in his mind, the most important film of all time. There’s one catch: on the way back home, the film is lost forever in a fire (I guess there are two catches: Rosenberger goes into a coma and awakes with failing memory). Anyway, Rosenberger commits to recreating the film from memory to preserve this masterful work.

    At over 700 pages, the novel is a sprawling and chaotic mess. There’s an essay to be written here—one I will never write—about the reason why so many white male American postmodern writers engage with film as their subject matter. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest introduces a film that drives people to disturbing lengths of obsession, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves hovers around a documentary film that doesn’t exist, and now Charlie Kaufman creates a film that couldn’t possibly be created due to its incredible scope. 

    More specifically, Cutbirth’s stop-motion film is most compelling for that which is unseen. Cutbirth’s project is impressive in the size of its final product (what is seen on screen), but also for everything that doesn’t make it on screen. Cutbirth has thousands of figures and models that he would move between every shot of his stop-motion masterpiece. All of them are off-screen, observing and living their own lives. Later in the book, Kaufman sorts them into tiers: the seen, the seen unseen, and the unseen unseen—it is the latter that most commands Cutbirth’s attention.

    These conceptual components are the most engaging parts of Kaufman’s novel. When he waxes philosophic, I find the novel introduces some compelling premises. Kaufman explores determinism in the section where Rosenberger tries to deduce an entire film from a single frame. He measures the trajectory of motion and anticipates the next moment, and the next, and the next. As a result, each moment predicts the future. By extension, the future can be traced far into the past. Cutbirth seems to understand this principle and operates in the world using that information. As such, when he and Rosenberger meet Cutbirth is able to communicate as if by telepathy when, in fact, we find out later that he anticipates what Rosenberger will say before it is said and responds before it was said, when it only existed as a thought. The other core concepts are the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the notion that observation changes the outcome of situations (hence why the Unseen figures of Cutbirth’s film are so critical).

    At times, Kaufman engages with the human consequences for such ideas. Rosenberger, for instance, reflects on his experience of derealization when watching Cutbirth’s film: “Just as the concept of zero was revolutionary in the history of mathematics, so must the concept of nothing be understood by future humans sometime in the future. I am experiencing nothing, which on the surface might seem oxymoronic: the notion of experiencing the negation of experience. But I am indeed, and I shall attempt to communicate it. Imagine a vast room with nothing in it. Go on. Now subtract the room. Now take away yourself imagining it. Now take away yourself imagining it you’ve taken away yourself imagining it. Now repeat the process again and again and again. Now take away the concept of time that allows for the notion of ‘again and again and again.’ This is nothing” (110). There’s another section hundreds of pages later in which Rosenberger is de-personalized again and there’s an entire section with lines that begin “Here’s what I no longer think” (590). He lists a set of notions that have disappeared from consciousness—that have become unthought—and I find that to be a poetic compelling moment in the text.

    The novel’s pockets of philosophy, though, are overshadowed by its absurdist humour. There’s a lot of silliness in the text. Between Rosenberger developing a fetish for clowns, sections of Cutbirth’s film mimicking Abbott and Costello routines, fast food ads serving as the soundtrack for human history up until its downfall, and so on—there’s a lot that falls flat. The novel explores the aesthetic value of humour; Kaufman considers the inherent pain of humour and its targets. It’s a worthwhile consideration, but it makes a lot of the jokes seem either purposeless or in poor taste.

    The one recurring bit of humour that I actually appreciated was the ongoing intertextual engagement with Molloy, which I recently reread with my class. When Rosenberger wakes up from his coma, he identifies his name as Molloy: “What does it mean? From whence does it come, to drop unbidden into my consciousness like a speeding metal bar? I recall that Mollow is a character in the eponymously named Molloy by S. Barclay Beckett. It is a book I have never read, even though I have heard of it sixty-three times, I believe, and have pretended to have read it many of those times. Could that be the Molloy I am thinking of? It is a mystery. Perhaps I will find my answers there. Then I recall that when I woke from my coma, I asked if my name was Molloy. Molloy, it seems, is some sort of key to all this” (114). After introducing the Beckett character, some components of the novel start to make sense. Kaufman draws from the absurdity of Beckett for the sake of silliness. Whereas Beckett’s absurdism, though, feels human / more-than-human—he seems like he reaches to the very core of human experience—Kaufman’s deployment of similar absurdity feels like a superficial engagement with the work.

    That being said, I enjoyed it whenever Mudd and Molloy showed up in Antkind. They create their own comedy duo, and Kaufman literalizes some of the motifs from Beckett’s work for his own purposes. When Rosenberger is watching Mudd and Molloy on screen, he doesn’t know whether it’s an earlier scene or a flashback. He comments, “If Moutarde has taught us one thing, it is that rigid sequence is a fiction. My eyeball self hovers in the back of the house, then slowly glides toward the stage, over the heads of the audience. It is a beautiful and graceful shot, which I am magnificently performing” (322). I like this moment because it feels like a really authentic moment where Kaufman finds the spirit of Beckett. In the later sections of The Unnameable, the narrator seems to become a disembodied eye. Kaufman applies that eye to engage in filmic commentary, but also explore time and cause and effect; I like how the interests of the books intersect in that moment. After, Rosenberger is “suddenly embodied, no longer just a floating eyeball, wandering old New York, searching for Molloy” (325). He questions a policeman in a top hat, and the moment feels like it could have been lifted from the initial section of Molloy. 

    The critical problem of the book, in my view, is the narrative voice. I have a very difficult time articulating precisely why the narrative feels imbalanced. Rosenberger is relentlessly rambling in his meditations, so much so that I got 300 pages into the book and wondered if it was actually going anywhere. Moreover, he feels compelled to justify himself to the audience on a continual basis, which leads to problematic engagement with social issues. Antkind sets up a trap for progressive readers. Rosenberger continually satirizes ‘wokeness’ by over-performing progressive values, all the while missing the point. It’s pathetic, for instance, how much Rosenberger begs to befriend Black people to prove that he’s not racist and it’s ridiculous the lengths he goes to when avoiding gendering people—to the extent that he negates peoples’ actual experience in the name of some more woke power. The humour felt like it was continually punching down, and I couldn’t reconcile it with the philosophy of humour Kaufman outlined elsewhere; if we acknowledge that humour is rooted in pain, the pain seems misplaced here in the person who acknowledges his privilege while refusing to let go of it. I wanted to believe that Rosenberger was being criticized for his misguided progressiveness, but the more I read the less sincere it felt; it felt more like an actual critique along the lines of “why can’t we just make films anymore—just because I’m a white man nothing I do is acceptable?” 

    I’d find Rosenberger’s ridiculousness easier to dismiss if it weren’t for the fact that Kaufman’s self-critique throughout the novel cannot possibly be sincere. Rosenberger continually praises Judd Apatow and continually disparages Charlie Kaufman films. Knowing that Kaufman wrote Rosenberger, I can’t believe he would realistically disparage himself in such seriousness. As such, it feels like we’re not supposed to believe in Rosenberger’s attitudes. In turn, it feels like we’re not meant to align with Rosenberger’s progressive values. It’s a difficult through-line. At the end of the day, it just feels like Kaufman is being an alarmist who has missed the point but so it goes.

    A lot of the middle section of the novel avoids progressing the story in any meaningful way, but in the last hundred pages Rosenberger engages once more with Cutbirth’s film. The boundary between fiction and reality thoroughly blurs. It is unclear what is happening in the film and what is happening in Rosenberger’s life, especially when Rosenberger starts to rebel against his creator. When he falls down a manhole (he corrects himself to say personhole) a new Rosenberger emerges. Three copies Rosenberger emerge in succession, each with their own affectations. 

    Eventually, Rosenberger (which one?) is able to watch the film again—or maybe the film; in the calamity of war it’s a little hard to tell. He watches a big rectangle light up on the cave wall; Antkind is largely influenced by Plato’s allegory of the cave. Rosenberger watches the rectangle and says, “A big rectangle lights up the cave wall. I am reminded of myself. A big rectangle lights up the cave wall. I am reminded of my beloved Rectangulists, as I always am at thes tart of any and every film, except those of the lone German Circulogue Edward Everett Horshack. But this is different. This is Ingo’s film, somehow also reborn from its own ashes (as I have been thousands of times from my own) and it is not at all as I remember it” (623). B. Rosenberger then explains differences with the film, which is now a “simple white rectangle, unencumbered [...] a blank canvas, a blank page [...] an empty room, an uncluttered mind in the form of a quadrangle” (623). The scene is an extended depiction of a white screen gradually giving birth to an image, perhaps over the span of years. Rosenberger’s considerations are that of the reader: “Is it a masterwork? Is it a sham? Am I being enlightened, or am I being conned? It is, it occurs to me, nothing more and nothing less than what I bring to it” (623). By this little deflection, Kaufman avoids responsibility for his text. I return once more to the section where Rosenberger develops a clown fetish. Did I get anything out of that? Did it mean something deeply human? If the text is “nothing more and nothing less than what I bring to it”, Kaufman is able to skirt responsibility for a lack of a cohesive vision because I didn’t do enough.

    While reading the text, I kept telling myself: this book is going to need a powerful ending to make this all worthwhile. I was thinking about Kaufman’s film Adaptation, which seems like it goes off the rails until one of Nicholas Cage’s characters delivers a monologue that serves as the argument to the film and brings it all together. While I wouldn’t say that Antkind does that exactly, the ending is reasonably compelling.

    Kaufman offers a meditation on time and film. Through Rosenberger, he says, “Let us say [...] time functions just as a motion picture through a projector, in that it is made up of discrete moments, that true movement is an illusion of perception paired with the mechanism of a cosmic ‘projector’” (682). He elaborates on the idea of an element of reality traveling, i.e. disappearing to anyone moving forward. He discusses the idea of an organism that reverses entropy. He considers forward-moving organisms in contrast to backward-moving organisms that consume the present in order to propel themselves further into the past, “ingest[ing] thoughts and memories and fantasies in the brains of forward-moving creatures, us[ing] the resulting energy to multiply, leaving the brain of these creatures, finding other brains further into the past, where it does more of the same, depositing waste products in those brains, which are the digested thoughts, memories, and fantasies of the previous (future) brains” (686). This idea of moving backward, of considering how the present affects the past connects meaningfully to the idea of identity. If all experiences are what we bring to them, and we don’t know yet who we are when we experience any given moment, it can radically alter what it means to have an identity. This in so many pages what Kierkegaard summarizes in a line: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” To explore the idea, Kaufman needs to invent and experiment with verb tenses: “what might I have done to the past by creating it?” (682). 

    Ultimately, the novel engages with some compelling ideas but its emotional core seems to be missing. Where Kaufman’s films have miserable characters that are sympathetic in the midst of the high-concept approaches, Rosenberger is such an unlikable narrator that I kept expecting to experience a revelation that would change my perception, that would give him the perfectly relatable humanity that would make the book worthwhile. I don’t think Kaufman ever quite gets there. Maybe he needs an actor to help sell it.

    Kaufman has written and directed a number of great films. I have watched them many times and find them worthwhile and enriching experiences. It’s unfortunate that Antkind demands itself to be sprawling. The impossibility of the film demands itself to be lengthy, absurd, layered. What the book would really benefit from, in my mind, is some editing; some of the moments really shine, some of the moments bellyflop into redundancy. Even so, I found myself turning the pages over and over again. For a book so long, I wouldn’t have thought I’d finish it so quickly; I suppose it did produce the desire in me to know more, the invitation into obsession alongside Rosenberger.

    I’m writing this review several weeks after finishing the book and my notes are somewhat incomplete, so I apologize if my review is as disorienting as the book itself. Nonetheless, I wish you happy reading—but more likely happy viewing.

Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble

    Imagine you’re in a conversation with someone who has said something horribly racist. Or homophobic. Or classist. Or transphobic. You’re exhausted. The notion they’ve presented is so patently ridiculous that you can’t even begin to explain why it’s so wrong. The idea of deconstructing an entire history of thought and breaking down the fallacies is overwhelming. So you tell them to do some research. They ask where. You could rattle off a bunch of books you’ve read, videos you’ve watched, and so on. But would they even be receptive? You instead say, “Just Google it.”

    Well, information is not neutral and that’s where Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression comes in. The subtitle of the book is How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, but the overall framework that Noble establishes here could easily transcend any number of intersections and is well-worth considering, especially given the last few years of the slogan “do your research” being thrown around willy-nilly.

    Noble’s text examines a range of issues related to the destructive impact and implications for search engines. She considers the economic forces that drive search engine optimization, the role of information sciences in sorting websites, issues in representation and identity, a discussion of the industry itself. There’s a reasonably broad range of considerations; some are welcome reminders of things we ought to know while others are genuinely insightful. The text overall serves as a nice primer, although I do wish that Noble delved more into some areas, specifically the mechanics of how things like search engine optimization work or more tangible case studies of Google searches / AI going awry.

    One of the common explanations that people give for the persistence of racism and White supremacy in tech is that there just aren’t enough Black (or other poc) coders. Noble addresses this concern when considering Google’s response to racist gaffes in their algorithms. In the first place, she exposes this as a false narrative: more Black and Latino people are graduating from college programs with degrees in computer science. The deeper level that Noble explores beyond that is the philosophical underpinnings of such a narrative. Quoting from another scholar, she notes that this narrative “that nothing can be done today and so we must invest in the youth of tomorrow ignores the talents and achievements of thousands of people in tech from underrepresented backgrounds and renders them invisible.” Meanwhile, “filling the pipeline and holding future Black women programmers responsible for solving the problems of racist exclusion and misrepresentation in Silicon Valley or in biased product development is not the answer.” I think this is an important point to acknowledge; the responsibility for disrupting the system from within is an onerous task and when there are already so many barriers to entry, the idea of trying to overcome the barriers and then dismantle them from within seems to be an unrealistic expectation on some of the more disempowered stakeholders while those with more power to enact change can easily do just that.

    Noble addresses further concerns within the industry, particularly “the exclusionary practices of Silicon Valley.” She continues on to note that we need to challenge “the notion that merit and opportunity go to the smartest people prepared to innovate” because that “render[s] people of colour non-technical [and reinforces that] the domain of technology belongs to Whites and reinforces the problematic conceptions of African Americans.” This myth of technology being driven by innovation and not by material factors overlooks some of the foundational components of the industry and Noble notes that the problem is “exacerbated by framing the problems as ‘pipeline issues’ instead of as an issue of racism and sexism, which extends from employment practices to product design.” The issue is that we continually place the burden in the wrong place: “‘Black girls need to learn how to code’ is an excuse for not addressing the persistent marginalization of Black women in Silicon Valley.” I appreciated that Noble addresses the negative impacts of such a mindset for people currently in the industry AND for those who will be impacted in the long-term, the coders of tomorrow.

    As a brief aside, one of the most compelling testimonials in the book comes from a former employee in big tech (I think at Facebook?). She commented on the way that hateful content was moderated, whether racist, sexist, homomphobic in its imagery or content. She identifies that there is a lack of transparency in what is and is not permitted—and is so by design. When content moderation standards are publicized and transparent, it becomes too easy to ‘game the system’ and morph offensive language into something new. 

    From here, Noble launches into a discussion of the economics of search. She recognizes that “on commercial social media sites and platforms, these principles [of content moderation] are always counterbalanced by a profit motive. If a platform were to become notorious for being too restrictive in the eyes of the majority of its users, it would run the risk of losing participants to offer to its advertisers” in turn, companies “err on the side of allowing more rather than less racist content.” Elon Musk is happily tweeting at such a model. It’s a bit strange to think about here, but the lack of transparency in content moderation actually seems beneficial, whereas total transparency leads to the wrong kinds of innovation.

    Very briefly, it was interesting, too, to see Noble’s discussion of pornography as a driving force for innovation with respect to online credit card payment, advertising and promotion, audio and video streaming technology, and so on. In Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines, he also notes how sexual impulses drive technological innovation—-and incidentally, there have been two stories in the news this week of note. For posterity’s sake, I’ll note that Replika (a chat-with-AI app) has suddenly ramped up its sexualization (offering to sell illicit photos, etc.)  and then just as suddenly shut it off completely. Meanwhile, we’ve got the Bing AI telling men they don’t actually love their wives, introducing itself as Sydney, and confessing love for the user (and asking for love in return!). Noble touches on the hypersexualization of Black bodies in Google’s algorithm, even when pornographic content is filtered out, so this will be an area that demands further academic study as we move forward in debates surrounding innovation, technology, and safety.

    Where Noble’s text really shines is in its discussion of how to reframe information sciences. We like to consider Google results (and the internet generally) as more or less neutral. In fact, we fail to account “for the complexities of human intervention involved in vetting of information nor [...] pay attention to the relative weight or importance of certain types of information.” I found this entire section illuminating. It’s worthwhile, of course, to consider what types of sources are being used and the credibility of individual sources, but to examine the sources within a broader network (literally and figuratively) is Noble’s most impressive feat. She compares the idea of citing works in a publication: “all citations are given equal weight in the bibliography, although their relative importance to the development of thought may not be equal at all. Additionally, no relative weight is given to whether a reference is validated, rejected, employed, or engaged, complicating the ability to know what a citation actually means in a document.” It made me think back to writing my thesis; I hadn’t really considered before how my bibliography includes an entry for a text from which I cited one line and an equal entry for a text that is foundational to my argument. Noble also discusses how “Authors who have become so mainstream as not to be cited, such as not attributing modern discussion of class or power dynamics to Karl Marx or the notion of the individual to the scholar of the Italian Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt mean that these intellectual contributions may undergird the framework of an argument but move through works without being cited any longer.” This can become a real problem for information found online. While algorithms may point to sources that seem more relevant or more cited, some forms of information may disappear in the shuffle or be decontextualized entirely. Conversely, there may be a number of works that are oft-cited but insignificant that nonetheless boost search engine scores.

    Unlike a project like my thesis, Noble points out that “scientific or scholarly citations, which once in print are persistent and static, hyperlinking is a dynamic process that can change from moment to moment.” She notes how the stability of results in Google rankings is continually shifting through search engine optimization and advertising. Unlike in academia, where “citation importance is a foundational concept for determining scholarly relevance in certain disciplines and citation analysis has largely been considered a mechanism for determining whether a given article or scholarly work is important to the scholarly community”, citation practices online are driven by particular kinds of tags and frequencies that, in some ways, get flattened in their decontexualization.

    I’ve referenced the idea of search engine optimization (SEO) in relation to citations. Search engine optimization drives ads or sites to the top of a result list, making weblinks profitable since they are presented as “the best” on the first page. Noble points out that “results that appear not to be advertising are in fact influenced by the advertising algorithm.” There can be sneaky and hidden practices for embedding and cross-referencing hyperlinks that give power to the most common, if invisible, sources—not for those with the greatest merit. The politics of such information sorting undergird the entire text and a persistent question emerges: who should be responsible for providing and dispensing information? Algorithms have failed us, and human intervention can also be flawed. At one point Noble addresses the political role of librarians and then presents some alternatives to Google that are tailored towards particular communities as an engaging model. For example, there are search engines that are geared towards vetted information about Jewish or Black experiences. As we accelerate into the future, I don’t find it hard to believe that the internet will become so replete with false information that it will cease to be valuable at all, so it’s important to address the question of alternatives now. 

    In Noble’s words, “if the government, industry, schools, hospitals, and public agencies are driving users to the internat as a means of providing services, then this confers a level of authority and trust in the medium itself.” I think about this in particular with respect to having students research, for instance, Indigenous content. I have to recognize my lack of expertise, but then I also have to recognize the problematic nature of asking them to look up information online. Noble is particularly concerned about issues of representation when it comes to particular identities. Recognizing that forms of representation can be harmful, and yet that our identities are crafted and documented online, “this raises questions about who owns identity and the identity markers in cyberspace and whether racialized and gendered identities are ownable property rights that can be contested.” Noble argues that social identity is formed both by individuals and in terms of social categorization that “happens at a socio-structural level and as a matter of personal definition and external definition.” Our identities, therefore, are mediated by depictions online and so we each have some vested interest in what that representation looks like.

    By extension, it’s worthwhile to consider the Right to be Forgotten Law in the European Union. At the time of the book being written, the same law did not extend to the United States, where “vulnerable individuals and communities are less likely to find recourse when troublesome or damaging information exists and is indexed by a commercial search engine.” What’s fascinating to me is that the law seems to enable very limited control of information. Even when you request your information to be deleted, “Google is still indexing and archiving links about people in groups within the EU on its domain outside of Europe, such as on Google.com, opening up new challenges to the notion of national boundaries of the web and to how national laws extend to information that is digitally available beyond national borders.” Because the internet is so pervasive, it’s wild to think that your information might exist elsewhere, yet you’re not able to find it, that your information is protected somewhere and yet not elsewhere. Results about you may still appear in Google’s public-facing search results, even when your claim to ownership has been asserted.

    Ultimately, Noble presents a compelling case for a Black feminist lens in critical information studies as a way of “contextualizing information as a form of representation or cultural production, rather than as seemingly neutral or benign data that is thought of as a website or a URL that surfaces to the top in a search. The language and terminologies used to describe results on the internet and commercial search engines often obscure the fact that commodified forms of representation are being transacted on the web and that these commercial transactions are not random or without meaning as simply popular websites.” 

    In an age that increasingly relies on big business to “feed us information” that leads us to unexpected places and conclusions, that allows erroneous, false, and private information to be part of the official record of the self online (despite our protestations), and the lack of protections and actions for challenging group and individual representations online, Algorithms of Oppression seems like a necessary starting place for some conversations about where the internet can and should go next. Especially as AI accelerates to unexpected places at an unmatched rate, the techno-politics we’ll be engaging in require a consideration of its economic, industrial, and sociological foundations.

    While I would have liked to see Noble deal with some more specifics and offer methods of taking action, Algorithms of Oppression will generate a great deal of conversation and allows me to reconsider how information is presented in my classes. Anyone who cares about the future should likely read this book (and moreover alongside the book Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell). 

    Happy reading and thanks to Michelle for the recommendation!

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

    The Booker Prize has a long history of impressing me. Many of my most memorable reads in recent years—The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi—have either won or made the shortlist for The Booker and I’m pleased to see that David Diop’s 2021 At Night All Blood Is Black has added to the Booker’s tradition of excellence.

    The book has a magnetic, entrancing style where the repetition of periapt sentences gives the novel an incantatory tone. The stream-of-consciousness approach is even more engrossing and appropriate when considering the central themes of the text, which are encapsulated in the three epigraphs to the novel. In that respect, I’d like to focus on two of the epigraphs in particular. One from Pascal Quignard reads, “Who thinks, betrays.” Another, from Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure says, “I am two simultaneous voices, one long, the other short.” The first of the quotes sets up an interesting juxtaposition of internal forces that ought to have no power and yet constitute an act in their own right: ideas that we theoretically cannot control nonetheless create an intentional act: betrayal.

    The second quote is more direct to the central premise of the novel, though in a roundabout literary way. At Night All Blood Is Black is a novel of so many doubles, both touching and sardonic. The story focuses predominantly on Alfa Ndiaya, a black soldier from Senegal fighting on France’s side in World War I. His friend, Mademba Diop, is killed in the war. There is a graphic depiction of the death: “a long ribbon of his intestine had escaped from my shirt knotted around his waist [...] they wouldn’t have dared to neatly gather his guts into the sacred vessel of his body” (10). The book’s graphic depiction of the death follows from a powerful moment where Mademba, knowing that he’s dying, begs Alfa to kill him.

    And Alfa doesn’t.

    The first part of the novel is Alfa ruminating on his failure to fulfil his duty. He allows his friend to die a grim death rather than take care of whom he refers to as a more-than-brother. As the novel goes on, Alfa reveals more to the audience about why he feels responsible for Mademba’s death; the friendly ribbing and history of competition between them, he feels, drove Mademba out of the trench first at the most inopportune time. The novel is full of pathos for these characters and it’s hard not to feel invested in Alfa’s bonds.

    From here, it’s difficult to describe why I found the novel so powerful, but I’ll start off by saying that for a war novel to grip my attention is no small feat. I often feel it’s all been done before and, despite their best efforts, tend to glorify combat. With Diop, not so. The novel is profoundly anti-war and offers some of the most grisly moments—juxtaposed ironically with moments of glory—that I can recall. In one moment, Alfa describes how the black soldiers are transformed into “savages” as a strategy; the German soldiers see them acting with frantic exaggerated “tribal” movements, but their French allies also see them as “savage.” Alfa narrates, “They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes. I know, I understand, it’s no more complicated than that. The captain’s France needs our savagery, and because we are obedient, myself and others, we play the savage. We slash the enemy’s flesh, we maim, we decapitate, we disembowel” (15). In the next breath, Diop describes how the French soldiers started disobeying their commander so he sent them out of the trench one-by-one to be unceremoniously slaughtered by the enemy in a Full Metal Jacket parade of waste. It drives home the message that for all the pretence of civility, the “good guys” are even more stomach-wrenchingly disgusting.

    The line between normalcy and transgression becomes a central motif in the novel. Alfa, avenging his friend, begins to lurk in the trenches, staying still and lying in wait for a blue-eyed victim. When they emerge for a cigarette, Alfa slices their knees and drags them away before torturing, killing, and dismembering them. Carrying on from the previous conversation about the soldiers’ savagery, he notes that “the only difference between them and me is that I became savage intentionally. They play a role only when they crawl out from the earth, but I play a role only with them, inside our sheltering trench” (15). The first three times he returns to camp with the dismembered hands of his victims, he is hailed as a hero; his cohorts even laugh and play practical jokes with the severed appendages. By the time he brings back the fourth, his comrades grow disgusted and terrified; they believe he is a dëmm, a devourer of souls. Alfa crosses an invisible boundary—it’s a more convincing version of one of the central characters in Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, if that serves as an adequate referent. Diop takes it further, though, by imbuing Alfa with a twisted paranoia. He collects and mummifies the hands and squirrels them away. The others are suspicious: “They thought I was an idiot,” he narrates, “but I’m not. The captain and the old Chocolat Croix de Guerre infantryman Ibrahima Seck wanted my seven hands so they could trap me. God’s truth, they wanted proof of my savagery so they could lock me up, but I would never tell them where I’d hidden my seven hands. They would never find them. They couldn’t imagine the quiet spot where they’d been laid to rest, dried and wrapped in cloth” (69). The madness of collecting these disturbing totems is exacerbated with the paranoia of having to hide the hands and I just find it all so compelling.

    If I provide a short summary of the book it will neither do it justice nor spoil what’s so great about it, so I’m going to offer that here: following these de-handinations (not a word, disregard), Alfa is removed from the front lines and sent to the military hospital, where he draws pictures to illustrate his past, at which point he reveals to the audience stories of his past. The novel then returns to the present for a surreal de-re-personalization finale that I found impossibly compelling in its implications and its rich layering.

    To return to the opening epigraph—“Who thinks, betrays”—a lot of the first section of the book revolves around what is acceptable to think and what is not. Moreover, it revolves around what is unthinkable. Alfa seemingly finds his freedom in his own mind: “No one knows what I think, I am free to think whatever I want” (15). Alfa can only bring himself to admit his reality inside his own impenetrable thoughts: “Since I’ve thought anything I want since then, I can admit everything to myself in the privacy of my mind. Yes, I told myself that I must be a dëmm [...] But I told myself, immediately after thinking it, that I couldn’t believe such a thing, that it wasn’t possible” (43).

    The boundary of interior-exterior and self-other falls apart almost immediately: “what I think is that people don’t want me to think. The unthinkable is what is hidden behind the captain’s words” (15). There’s another kind of invisible boundary in the way that people think. When discussing his perception of himself as a dëmm, he immediately follows it up with, “At that time, it wasn’t really me who was thinking. I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own. I wasn’t hearing myself think anymore, but was hearing the others who were afraid of me. You have to be careful, when you believe you’re free to think what you want, not to let in the thinking of others, in disguise, the false thinking of your father and mother, the spurious thinking of your grandfather, the masked thinking of your brother or sister, of your friends, in other words, of your enemies” (43). The ambiguity of Alfa’s identity—of his perceptions—is so perfectly wrought in relation to the other themes in the text. There’s a battle between the interior-exterior and an affinity with / to / as others that appears in various forms throughout the novel. The uncertainty of how other peoples’ thoughts permeate your own and consequently how they manipulate your own agency is a compelling theme.

    The dualities between thought/action and self/other are brief examples, but they recur in various forms throughout the text. At some level, truth and fiction emerge as another. When complaining of how the other soldiers treat him (“the bad side of my crimes had won out over the good side” (67)), he says “I became a dangerous madman, a bloodthirsty savage. God’s truth, that’s how things go, that’s how the world is: each thing is double” (67). On the one hand, this can be read that everything is repeated; on the other hand, it could mean that each thing is contradictory. The idea emerges even in the repeated phrase “God’s truth” that Alfa uses throughout the text. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially Alfa questions the omnipotence of God’s truth and so all of the professions to truth are actually a sign of their opposite; he doth protest too much.

    Following his attacks on enemy soldiers, Alfa recognizes the randomness of fate that “made [Alfa] capture him and not someone else” (64). He elaborates that “It was written on high that it would be him I would find in the middle of the night (64) but then says, “Now I know, I understand that nothing is simple about what’s written on high. I know, I understand, but I don’t tell anyone because now I think what I want, for no one but myself, ever since Mademba Diop died. I believe I understand that what’s written on high is only a copy of what man writes here below. God’s truth, I believe that God always lags behind us. It’s all He can do to assess the damage. He couldn’t have wanted me to catch the little blue-eyed soldier in the hot pit of the enemy trench” (64). A few things worth of note here are that there’s an inversion of the truth. Alfa is using the incantatory phrase “God’s truth” takes on an ironic quality; he uses it to offer credibility to his account of events, but in the passage above we see that “God always lags behind us,” so essentially he is establishing truth himself only to be received later: “what’s written on high is only a copy of what man writes here below.” Thus, Alfa takes on a role as a kind of world-builder. The other thing worth noting is that Alfa does not want to tell anyone the truth and thinks for himself, supposedly, only following Mademba Diop’s death.

    Alfa is pulled away from the front lines to be treated at the hospital. Despite the unreliable narration, it’s clear that he is being treated for psychological concerns and is provided with some level of rudimentary therapy. While he’s there, he professes that he’s rendered himself impenetrable to external ideas. He recounts, “Nothing could enter into the insides of my head. I know, I understand that the memory of my mother had calcified the entire surface of my mind so it was hard like a tortoise’s shell” (109). It’s interesting that this reaction emerges while externalizing his memories in a series of drawings. Ironically, he says that “there was nothing beneath this shell but the void of waiting” and then immediately says “the space where knowledge would have gone was already occupied” (109) — keep that line in mind for later. Alfa sees his mind as opened only when Mademba dies: “a big metal seed of war fell from the sky and cracked my mind’s shell in two. God’s truth, a new suffering joined with the old one. The two contemplated each other, they explained each other, they gave each other meaning” (109). It’s incredible how well-wrought these lines are. There’s a density to their presentation riddled with paradox and contradiction. 

    Returning a moment to the plot, Alfa draws pictures in the hospital which lead to a series of memories of figures from his past. Truth be told, I found this section the least compelling, though it is necessary for the ending of the book to deliver the way it does. When he’s drawing his mother, Alfa’s approach to art serves as a ‘key’ to the rest of the book: “What brings a drawing on a piece of paper to life is the play of shadow and light. [...] These glints of light leapt out from white slivers of paper that I had not colored in with black” (95). The focus on contrast and the hints of minimalism intimate the approach of the novel as a whole. With the slightest gestures, the full picture is provided.

    Alfa also draws pictures that send his memories back to Fary Thiam, a romance he had before coming to war. He recounts their amorous tryst prior to coming to war and the jealousy it potentially inspired in Mademba. He then draws the seven hands he stole and we return to the internal/external dilemma: “I had to show them to Doctor Francois so that they would leave the inside of my head” (125). Unfortunately, he continues, “My seven hands spoke, they confessed all to my judges. God’s truth, I know, I understand that my drawings denounced me” (125). The external betrays the internal, and inner thoughts once again create a tangible reality with consequences.

    The ending of the novel is one of the most surreal sleights-of-hand I’m likely to recall years from now. With roughly a third of the novel left, there’s a moment that happens in the hospital. It appears to me that Alfa rapes a nurse that had been caring for him but he is disembodied at the same time, insensible to her responses. I had to reread the section because it seemed un-real (not surreal). The novel then takes a strange turn and recounts a myth purportedly widely shared in Senegal. It effectively halts the momentum of the novel for a fair stretch. The narrator then gives commentary on the story that is in its own right fascinating: “I swear to you that I heard the story of the lion-sorcerer just before leaving for war. The story, like all interesting stories, is full of clever innuendo. Whoever tells a well-known story like the one about the lion-sorcerer and the fickle princess might always be hiding another story beneath it. To be seen, the story hidden beneath the well-known story has to peek out a little bit. If the hidden story hides too well beneath the well-known story, it stays invisible. The hidden story has to be there without being there, it has to let itself be guessed at, the way a tight saffron-yellow dress lets the beautiful figure of a young girl be guessed at. It has to be transparent. When it’s understood by those for whom it is intended, the story hidden beneath the well-known story can change the course of their lives, can push them to transform a diffuse desire into a concrete act. It can heal them from the sickness of hesitation, no matter the expectations of an ill-intentioned storyteller” (144). The penultimate passage to the novel gives a sort of manifesto to the book. It is both hidden and not, the shadow of a story traced around itself. What’s incredible, though, is how the passage frames other events in the text as well as it frames the mythic story. The stories Alfa and Mademba tell one another ultimately, in Alfa’s eyes, force Mademba to his own demise.

    But the ending gets better. The narration continues, “But now that I think deeply about it, now that I take on God’s truth as my own, I know, I understand that Alfa left me a place in his wrestler’s body out of friendship, out of compassion. I know, I understand that Alfa heard the first supplication I uttered in the depths of no-man’s-land on the night of my death. Because I didn’t want to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, in a land without a name. God’s truth, I swear to you that now, whenever I think of us, he is me and I am him” (145). Diop pulls an incredible move here. The tell-tale signs of Alfa’s narration repeat in this passage—“God’s truth”, for one—but did you notice what happened? In the final pages we see Alfa externalized into the third person and the narrator is suddenly new; the narrator is suddenly a version of Mademba that has lived beyond his death. With no indication that there was a shift, the first-person point of view creates a moment of genuine surprise that then requires us to re-evaluate previous moments in the text.

    Let me return to the moment when Alfa attacks the nurse. Following the moment, the next chapter starts with this narration: “Where I’ve come from, I swear, nobody has a name. I’m going to open my eyes that are no longer mine. I don’t know who I am. My name escapes me still, but I’ll remember it soon. Strange, the body beneath mine isn’t moving anymore. Strange, I sense its immobile heat beneath me. Strange, I sense, suddenly, hands pressing on my back, a back that doesn’t entirely belong to me yet, thighs that are not yet mine, a neck that doesn’t belong to me but that I absorb, that I accept as mine, thanks to the soft hands touching me. Strange, the hands are suddenly pummeling my back, my thighs, scratching at my neck. Beneath their scratching, this body that wasn’t yet mine became mine. I swear to you, it’s pleasant to leave nothingness. I swear to you that I was there without being there” (128). I’m fascinated by the framing of this moment. On my initial read-through, I found it compelling because Alfa is in a state of becoming. This idea of not-yet being who you are and the temporal flux of identity is always a compelling premise to me, and Diop’s phrasing is wonderful: “thighs that are not yet mine […] this body wasn’t yet mine became mine [...] I was there without being there”. All of those paradoxes of selfhood are an excellent reflection of identity. On rereading, though, the passage becomes more engaging. It seems, to me, that Mademba enters Alfa’s body. It’s a moment of re-becoming, but because Alfa had previously been talking about his first time with a woman, the memory becomes conflated with Mademba’s seeming re-embodiment.

    Whether this is a metaphor or not is unimportant. On the one hand, there’s the magical layer, but at the more metaphorical level Alfa is haunted by the presence of his more-than-brother. We often think of holding those close to us in our hearts; here it may be quite literal. It also works on the level of processing memory; the fragmentation of selfhood that goes along with Alfa’s wartime trauma seems to be processed through a simultaneous experience of two selves. It’s a surprising twist that makes the book worthy of rereading.

    Listen, I generally don’t like war stories. This book, though, is such a glorious exception. There is a poetry to the novel that is as disturbing as it is hauntingly beautiful. In describing the artillery, Alfa describes “the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky” (34). The idea of the artillery as ‘seeds’ gives it a haunting quality that insinuates growth from such a massively destructive force. The “seeds” are then personified: “they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and to sever lives. Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. [...] But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers. And that’s when you stop being the brave one, the death-defier, and become instead the true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother” (34). The image of something so innocent, seeds drifting in the wind, piercing skulls is just such a grotesque juxtaposition it’s hard to ignore.

    All this to say, David Diop presents such a distinctive voice throughout the novel and explores a network of themes that tie together beautifully. It’s such a well-wrought book and offers an angle to war narratives I’ve never seen before. It’s still early in the year, but I would not be surprised if this is one of my best reads of 2023.

    

Happy reading about miserable things!

Almond by Sohn Won-Pyung

    In the first few pages after opening Sohn Won-Pyung’s Almond, the central character recounts witnessing his mother and grandmother falling victim to a horrific killing. The next fifty pages rewind to build the backstory around Yunjae and his family before building up to the attack and exploring the aftermath as Yunjae tries to move on, make friends, and subsist as an orphan.

    The central conceit of Almond is that the main character, Yunjae, is unable to feel emotions as the result of a brain condition called alexithymia. As a result, he has difficulty communicating with others, and the author very pointedly and tactfully notes it is distinct from autism or aspergers. The title derives from the similarity of the relevant part of the brain, the amygdala, being derived from the word almond—and Yunjae’s mother feeding him almonds in the hopes that that part of his brain will grow. The angle for the novel is underexplored and consequently pretty interesting and the pacing of the novel is very good. It’s a speed-read YA novel and definitely more engaging than most books of its genre. There are a number of threads which are actually somewhat difficult to disentangle for the purpose of a short review. Nevertheless I shall attempt.

    Yunjae’s mother runs off with a man, which causes a rift with her own mother. Yunjae’s grandmother disowns his mother and the two do not see each other for seven years. When Yunjae’s father dies in an accident, his mother tries to take care of him, teach him how to communicate with other peoples’ emotions, and pay the bills with a book store. When she finds herself struggling, she introduces Yunjae to his grandmother, who immediately dotes on him.

    One year on Yunjae’s birthday, the family goes out for dinner. A man begins killing people at random; he kills Yunjae’s mom with a hammer and his grandmother with a knife as she tries to defend Yunjae. Following the attack, Yunjae starts at a new school, where the other students make him into somewhat of a sensation, and they are endlessly curious about how he could be so unaffected by witnessing such a horrifically traumatic event.

    Of course, going to school entails its own bullies and another boy in the class is relentless in bullying Yunjae. Incidentally, the bullying and dialogue is overblown and doesn’t ring true. In one scene, Gon (the bully) and Yunjae are in a restaurant; Gon starts throwing plates all over the restaurant and having a temper tantrum and it just doesn’t ring true at all. Elsewhere, the bullying scenes somewhat pay off. When Gon is relentlessly beating Yunjae, Yunjae doesn’t react and makes a comment about how Gon is bullying himself; it borders on an interesting existential moment. Admittedly, though, Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven is a somewhat similar premise but far more exceptional in its emotional and philosophical nuance.

    As the book goes on, Gon and Yunjae develop an unlikely friendship which is not without some sweet moments of tenderness. Against all odds, Yunjae still runs his mom’s bookstore and Gon becomes a regular, bullying Yunjae into loaning him collectors’ pornography. It leads to an engaging moment, again bordering on the existential and again more accomplished in Kawakami’s work, where Gon reflects on the nature of aging. After doing a Google search on one of his favourite actresses and finding out that she’s old, he expresses concerns with Yunjae about their own aging. It’s a moment where the dialogue between teenagers actually reads as believable. So much of YA treats 15 year olds like they’re 6, so to actually have teenagers talking about some deeper issues was refreshing, even if there’s no payoff for it later.

    Similarly, Yunjae has concerns over whether he is a psychopath, concerned that his lack of ability to feel emotion is what links him to mass murderers. I have to give Won-Pyung credit for the tasteful representation of mass killings. Many authors would use it as an opportunity for an extended discourse on societal ills. The novel maintains a light touch that trusts the readers. When discussing the motivations of the mass murderer, there is some suggestion that he would align with incels or something of the sort, but it’s hinted at just enough that you could delve into the conversation with students or gloss right over it if it’s not the right audience.

    I also appreciated the references to the way the media depicted the events following the attack, Yunjae discusses how much attention the killer got on the news, where his every motivation was thoughtfully deconstructed and where he was made to be sympathetic or provided justification. Meanwhile, the victims were essentially ignored in the impact the attack had on them. It’s the kind of social commentary that doesn’t bludgeon the audience; it’s extremely tasteful and helps the clip of the novel move along.

    As I mentioned above, the pace of the book is quite good. The book is full of short chapters and little vignettes. It’s wonderfully achieved, though there are two key developments that felt somewhat too abrupt. In the first case, the romance that Yunjae develops with a girl in his class happens very quickly, which is even less believable given Yunjae’s supposed inability to feel emotions. The other section of the book that speeds through is the climax; it always seems tough to pull off a climax in YA fiction because the stakes are so difficult to establish. The climax, while lackluster, isn’t that bad, all things considered. In some ways, the book is transparently manipulative. Even so, it does seem to have a strange kind of power. In particular, the bully Gon has a backstory that hits every trope in the book. He was kidnapped as a child and only returned to his family when his mom was on the verge of death. By the time his dad finds him, though, Gon has become a hardened criminal and out of shame does not introduce him to his dying mother. Instead, Gon’s father pretends that Yunjae is his long lost son (long story) so that Gon’s mother can die in peace. Tragic enough, sure. Then, it becomes clear that Gon suffers from low self-esteem, that he is lashing out because he hates himself, and so on. It’s super obvious that giving him a sympathetic backstory is a manipulation tactic but it does make him a sympathetic character and ultimately makes the dynamic between the central characters quite tender and beautiful.

    Almond is at its best when Won-Pyung is developing that central relationship, which is nearly coded as a romance. Sometimes the sweetness of the novel doesn’t land. In particular, Yunjae has a love of books and discusses how they take us to all kinds of different worlds and expands the mind and so on. To me, it doesn’t seem authentic for someone who feels no emotions: how would you be compelled towards the characters? I suppose maybe it’s instructive, but the other part of me thinks that it’s part of a Big Books Conspiracy in YA fiction where it has to convince kids that reading is cool so that it can be included in classrooms. Anyway, the ending of the book is also pretty saccharine in a way I won’t identify for fear of spoilers.

    Overall, Almond is a pretty engaging story that is quite competent. When classed alongside other YA counterparts, I think Won-Pyung excels in the genre. The novel, in most respects, works. In the areas that don’t work for me, I think it’s still more successful than much of its competition. The characters are the highlight, even when somewhat trope-y, and the pace of the book is really masterfully accomplished. It’s a book I’d recommend to some of my younger readers [even though I’d have to give trigger warnings for death, violence, sex, and bullying] as a book that does promote awareness and empathy without being so overt as to prompt an immediate rebellion in the classroom.

    Happy reading, people! May your inner almond grow!