Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

    David Lynch is such an incredible force in the world of art and film, having spent decades cultivating his distinct voice—and voice, both figuratively and literally, is an important component of Room to Dream. I listened to the audiobook of Lynch’s biography / memoir, co-written with Kristine McKenna, and hearing Lynch himself speak adds a unique charm, given his voice’s unique charm.

    In terms of structure, the book is pretty engaging. McKenna writes sections of more objective biography and reportage and then David Lynch ‘corrects the record,’ as it were, giving his own perspectives and anecdotes that would generally not warrant inclusion in a biography. Those moments standout as particularly endearing, narrated kind of like grandpa Simpson talking about tying an onion to his belt, which was the style at the time, where the main narrative is suddenly interrupted by David Lynch talking about the best chocolate milk or donut he has ever had, or his discussion of being in France and how he “found out how great these pommes frites are, these French fries, and they coaxed [him] into doing these interviews by giving [him] all these pommes frites, which were incredible”.

    One of the things I find so engrossing about Lynch as an artist and personality is his capacity for finding an exuberant pleasure in such simple things. His films explore such bizarre depths that it seems a contradiction that something as simple as French fries are a transcendent experience. It points towards Lynch’s focus on minutiae. The grand vision of his work is comprised of details significant, sometimes, only to him. In one section, for instance, the book notes that Lynch hides things around the set that would never be noticed and yet are supposedly crucial to the scene—coffee beans under the bed, for instance. The book suggests the intensity of attention that drives Lynch’s work and that is demanded of his audience. One witness to Lynch’s early art career describes how Lynch was creating an oil painting of a boat by a dock: “He was putting the paint on really thick at that point and a moth had flown into the painting and as it struggled to get out of the paint it made this beautiful swirl in the sky. I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.” 

    In fact, a central tension of the text is between the divine and the macabre. Lynch finds such beauty in all facets of life: light and darkness in equal measure. In the beginning of the book, there are scenes of Lynch playing in the street with his friends in a vision of classic Americana juxtaposed with chilling moments, including one in which he encounters a naked woman wandering in the street who has been beaten. Not to give too simplistic a reading, but there are parallels with Lynch’s filmic language. I’m picturing a scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that presents a similar vision to the one narrated about Lynch’s youth. In another scene, he talks about driving high at night where the darkness surrounds the road and narrows his vision: for that, it’s almost as though his teenage shenanigans are the inciting force for Mulholland Drive: the iconic shot of the centre lines in the road and the irresponsible young drivers that cause the crash that saves Rita’s life echoed in my mind’s eye.

    As expected from the biography of an artist, there is thorough account of Lynch’s various projects. Given the opacity of his works, the book does not reveal their meaning, of course, but gives a glimpse into the world of filmmaking. The projects with which I’m most familiar are the sections of the book I was most invested in, particularly Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks. While I’m familiar with Eraserhead, Dune, and Lost Highway, I’ve only seen them once each and my memory is less faithful. That said, the behind-the-scenes anecdotes are all compelling either for revealing how the projects come together or how certain choices came to pass. The coincidences behind casting Mulholland Drive, for instance, are pretty serendipitous to the project. There’s also accounts of projects that never materialized which are evocative to the imagination in compelling ways. Poor, poor Ronnie Rocket.

    Some details I knew—Lynch being asked to direct a Star Wars sequel, for instance—but I didn’t know the depths of their connection. He was also offered American Beauty, and I can’t help but imagine what a different film that might have been with him at the helm. As I mentioned, the sections that David Lynch narrates himself are incredibly endearing and add to the humour of the book. He narrates an anecdote in which Marlon Brando was given a private screening of Lost Highway (Lynch had wanted him to be in the film). Hearing Lynch tell the story is hilarious: “Marlon came in and the man who owned the theater had a bunch of treats [...] and Marlon filled his pockets with all sorts of candies, this man told us, and then Marlon went in and he also had hamburgers and different things in his pockets, so basically, he was eating during the whole screening—hamburgers that he brought on his own. So, after the screening he left and the next day he called me and he said, “David, it’s a damn good film, but it won’t make a nickel.’” It’s such an absurd image. Imagine a guy with pockets full of hamburgers just pulling out burger after burger the length of the film. Now imagine David Lynch’s voice saying that. I laughed every time I listened to it.

    The same is true when Lynch went on tangents about his own affectations. I’ll fail to reproduce the full effect, but in one moment Lynch describes his personal style and its rationale: “I button the top button on my shirt because I like the way it looks but also I don’t like any air on my collar bones. For some reason, that really bothers me. I don’t like, anyone, you know, fiddling with my collar bones, and I don’t like air on them.” Why are people fiddling with your collar bones, David?!

    Actually, reading the book would suggest that Lynch has had his collarbones fiddled with a fair amount. He’s a charming man—and a bit of a philanderer. You can get the impression of his habits early in his life, a throughline you can trace through the accounts given by his four wives. If there’s something that will retroactively challenge Lynch’s artistic achievements, it will be his relationship with women (though, to be clear, none of the women seem to bear ill-will towards him, just a recognition that he loves love and he loves his work). If there are two things that will retroactively challenge Lynch’s artistic achievements, it will be his confusing political affiliation.

    Yet, in some ways, issues like politics seem beneath Lynch. Again and again, Lynch returns to an endorsement of transcendental meditation. It arises at critical moments in his life and he presents a pretty persuasive case for engaging in the practice. He refers to the brain research of transcendence, offers it as a means for ensuring we treat others well, and an avenue for creativity. In his words, “I always say that negativity is the enemy of creativity and this conduit through which ideas flow, stress and all this tension, it squeezes that conduit and blocks the little beautiful little ideas from flowing through so you can catch them.” Transcendental meditation brings us to the level of consciousness that allows for inner happiness, external happiness, and, by extension, our creative faculties flourish. And, judging from Lynch’s manic productivity, it really does inspire you to make the art you want to make.

    Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who is very much not a fan of Lynch, for understandable reasons. When she asked me why I liked Lynch, and my answer was that I am drawn into the not knowing. When I think of books that I love, films that I love, and so on, there’s a kind of unanswerable mystery at the core. I am compelled by what requires deciphering, particularly when it evades a conclusive response. Even though Room to Dream gives some answers to Lynch’s life, it does not do so in a way that diminishes his art. Despite the fact that this biography is as likely as we are to get to a definitive account of his life and work, it maintains the impression that there is always more to discover, always more left unsaid.

The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 1 by Steven L. Kent

If you read the full title of the Steven L. Kent’s book, you’ll get a sense of its sprawling scope: The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon – The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World. Actually, the title is somewhat misleading because the discussion predates even Pong, going back to carnival games and the burgeoning coin-op market. It then progresses through the history of new technologies, gaming companies, and so on, largely pinned around the release of new gaming systems and the response the public had.

The title is also a little misleading in that, really, it ought to be called the penultimate history of video games, given that after 600 pages, we just get to the release of Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation 2, and Sega Dreamcast. Despite this book only going until about the year 2000, I have to say: it was more than enough.

In fact, the book makes me wonder about my commitment to capital-H History against what I would say is journalism. History, as presented here, offers a lengthy fact sheet but with, what I would argue, is not much of an ‘angle.’ There are lengthy sections that talk about what games were released, what the games were about, how many units they sold, and so on. I had a touch of ‘the nostalgias’ when it would refer to games that I played and enjoyed—the masterpieces of Final Fantasy III or Super Mario RPG, for example—but much of the time I felt like I was reading a game catalogue. Essentially, I needed more of why do these things matter? What’s the narrative thread that makes it compelling? What’s the hook? It’s a book that really highlights the difference between what I might refer to as ‘straight history’ against cultural criticism, philosophy, theory, or, as I mentioned, journalism. 

One vein that would be well-worth more mining is something that Kent glosses over, gives only a passing comment. Perhaps it’s because early games were seen as forms of gambling, but the Yazuka were involved in the game industry. Kent notes that one clan of the Japanese mafia “tried to take over Konami, the company that made Frogger and Contra. When the owner of the company appealed to a friend in a rival clan for help, he touched off a war and had to go into hiding. When Nakamura investigated the counterfeit Breakout machines, he discovered that a Yakuza clan had manufactured them. It was a dangerous situation.” That, to me, comes as such a surprise—if the investigative journalism were to make it possible, a whole book just about that could be an incredible, riveting book.

Some of the most interesting, entertaining moments of the text are offered as throwaway bits of humour. Most notably, the exchanges between programmers and their bosses I found really compelling for what they said about the work culture of the video game industry. One of the bosses recounts the challenges of working with programmers in the early days of gaming, since they would show up for work, do something great, and then disappear for a few days. In one anecdote, a developer gives the following anecdote, which resonates with me for obvious reasons:

I understood that this was a very talented breed of people. I remember one guy came in; he was stoned out of his mind, he just wanted to read poetry to me, and I sat with him for four hours because he was one of our top programmers, just to let him feel I understood him and I cared about him. At the end he said, “You know, I really appreciate what you’ve done for me.” 

That programmer’s eccentrism is a delight, since it blends two of my core interests. In recounting the development of the first Final Fantasy game, Kent notes that creator Hironobu Sakaguchi had intended to leave the video game industry. Final Fantasy was to be his exit (of course, before it sold massively well and roped him back in). I loved the interaction between him and is boss that Sakaguchi recounts as follows:

[At the time] The only person you had to go to was the president of the company, and he didn’t really understand games that well. Selling him on the concept of an RPG wasn’t that hard. I just went up and said, “I want to do an RPG.” He said, “Is that good? Is that interesting?” and I said, “Yeah. It’s fun.” So, he said, “Okay.”

The blasé approach of the boss is a delight. The simplicity of their interaction is great, and I have to say the audiobook delivers the lines “Is that good? Is that interesting?” in just a perfect tone. The ignorance of the boss towards what an RPG is funny, but appropriate, given that RPGs hadn’t gotten huge yet. Actually, the whole story of how Final Fantasy came to exist is pretty interesting, since they started with the hardware and then decided how to structure the game (rather than having an idea for the game and then building around the hardware).

Kent’s history, though, is at its most interesting when he discusses the conflicts and legal battles that ensued as the industry developed. There were some pretty shady tactics in the early games industry. For instance, Atari established its own competition to corner more of the coin-op machine market. They asked a neighbour to start the company, gave them their #2 guy in everything, gave them designs to get started, and so on. Atari members were on the corporate board of the competition they established in an elaborate ruse.

There are two core legal battles that Kent references throughout the book that stand out as significant historical moments: issues over copyright and issues over video game violence. In 1988, Atari lawyers illegally obtained a reproduction of the TenNES program by going to the copyright office and signing a false affidavit where they claimed to need access to defend themselves against an infringement suit Nintendo hit them with. The suit, though, was “entirely fictional.” That then gave them the ability to develop ways around their security features. I can’t believe that they were so ballsy about it. I kind of love the duplicitousness. There was also quite a bit about proprietary programs and intellectual property. There were discussions of the limitations of form, when drawings become more human than animal figurations, when patents apply if the user’s input is required. All of those legal fights are interesting in their own right, which again, might warrant further attention in a deep-dive book.

The other legal case is as you might expect. The debates about video game violence have been raging on for years and especially, Kent notes, following the massacre at Columbine. The conspiratorial nature of the case is compelling. Sega emerged into the video game scene with a more in-your-face 90s radical attitude, which meant video games with more violence, like Mortal Kombat. Sega was also doing very well financially, and so when lawsuits about video game violence emerged, there were rumours that Nintendo orchestrated—or at least encouraged—the hearings to damage Sega’s “runaway sales”,  since Nintendo is more family-friendly and could gain an edge there. Just as a moment of irony, I’ll mention here that the same company that was manufacturing games based on Bible stories was also manufacturing pornographic ones, so the ethics of the industry are hard to pin-point. For all the moralism, there’s always money to be made.

The section on video game violence also made me reconsider time. One woman testified about how games that were more mature still had toys that were advertised towards children. It’s a reasonable moment of hypocrisy to call out, actually, and the discussion of toys made me think about how time has collapsed at either end. Young children play games targeted towards older players (for me: Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and Resident Evil were probably in this category), and older players collect toys that are geared towards children. It’s just an interesting way to consider the human experience. Maybe we’re seeing that ‘age’ has ended.

As you can see, there are some interesting moments in the history, but as I tell my students: there needs to be a more specific angle to make it truly compelling. By the end of the 600 page book, I was already long-ready to move on. In addition, the style of the book rarely justifies its length. In some ways, it’s like reading an extensive Wikipedia page. So, even though the history of video games post 2001 would likely be far more compelling, I think I’ve had quite enough of Kent’s brand of history for now. Maybe in ten years we’ll see where we’re at.

Happy reading; happy new year.

The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman

[This review is pretty delayed, so the timeline of its introduction no longer makes sense, but here we are.]

For the last two weeks, when people asked what I was reading, I would respond evasively—I was reading a book about Chile; it was a book about the overthrow of Salvador Allende; it was a mystery novel of sorts, and so on—I was careful not to share the title of the book, given its off-putting title: The Suicide Museum, written by Ariel Dorfman. If you find the title alarming, well, you should. The book is punishing, but one of the most compelling novels I read this year.

The essential premise is this: a Chilean exile, Ariel Dorfman, is tasked by a mysterious billionaire, Joseph Hortha, to investigate the circumstances of Salvador Allende’s death. There are competing versions of the story, and for reasons unknown, the billionaire wants to know whether Allende went down fighting during the coup or whether he took his own life. Dorfman travels around investigating and interviewing witnesses close to the revolution, almost in the style of a detective novel, measuring one account against another. Meanwhile, Ariel attempts to write a detective novel that addresses the “disappeared” and other unspoken horrors of Pinochet’s regime. Partway through, Hortha reveals the importance of Allende’s death: Hortha is building a Suicide Museum, a gruelling exhibit that leads its visitors through rooms and rooms of photographs of people who have taken their own lives, building towards an ecological exhibit of tree photographs. His message: we are all collectively involved in the suicide of our species and we need to be compelled to take action. Allende’s photograph (or lack of) will determine the impact of the project.

What I love about The Suicide Museum is that it draws from so many rich wells. There are any number of angles through which it could be discussed. With respect to literary theory alone, I could see essays written about it through a New Historical lens, a Marxist lens, a feminist lens, a Poststructuralist lens, an ecocritical lens, and beyond. I sometimes think about what makes books ‘classic’: how do we know they will endure? To me, Dorfman captures the spirit of a classic: a book that doesn’t shy away from engaging in important conversations across multiple fields and disciplines. The sheer breadth of the work makes it well-worth reading and, if our species doesn’t self-eradicate, it will continue to be a powerful work for years to come.

Conceptually, I found the book riveting, if sometimes challenging. It was sometimes hard to remember which character was which (i.e. who had what role in witnessing Allende’s death). I would not say that characterization is one of the strong points of the novel, but also I would make a very poor detective because I don’t keep the details straight. Nonetheless, I found myself engrossed in this mystery, which again—I’m not clear, entirely, on the truth of the matter. The ambiguity and lack of resolution is, in many ways, critical to the work itself.

The fictional Dorfman points towards the challenges of writing about history in a conversation with Hortha. The billionaire asks him whether Ariel has ever wanted to write a novel about Allende, to which he responds, “Not really [...] I’m much too close to the subject. If I respected him less, maybe. But that admiration would kill freedom, the ability to shape the story anywhere it took me. It would be a lazy book, full of myths and no transgressions. A novelist dealing with a real person from the past must be ready to betray that person, to lie in order to tell a deeper truth. I could never do that. It would be exploitative. Writers have to be ruthless” (38). This passage proves critical for The Suicide Museum as a text. At the core of the text is a challenging engagement with the “freedom” afforded by story. Without spoiling too much, Ariel makes use of stories strategically, with ambiguous ethical commitments. The “transgressions” of the book emerge in its own lack of certainty, and Dorfman refuses to “betray” the memory of Allende, and yet … it does appear that lies support a “deeper truth.” Dorfman points towards the challenge of writing about history, particularly when it’s so deeply political. How does one follow the writerly advice to “kill your darlings” if you still firmly believe in their ultimate goodness? The passage recalls to me, in some ways, the film Adaptation, where Nicolas Cage’s character explains his plans for a film adaptation of a book and outlines everything he doesn’t want it to be—which is what the film Adaptation becomes.

Throughout The Suicide Museum, the boundaries between fiction and reality are complex. As the aforementioned conversation continues, Hortha asks if writers really have to be ruthless and sacrifice everything, including their families. The fictional Dorfman answers as follows:

“You pray it won’t come to that sort of choice … But the truth is I’ve already left my family, those real people I most love, unattended while I spend hours—in fact, months—with fictional characters who—I mean, those imaginary men and women only exist because I can conjure them up, and if I don’t keep faith with them, they’ll wither away, like a plant that dies from lack of water. That total dedication to my creatures gives me the right to be ruthless, condemn them to death or ruin, failure or blindness or solitude, according to the needs of the story” (38-39).

There are two elements of the text that get highlighted here. In the first case, he refers to the need to leave his family to commit to his art. Indeed, throughout the book, the fictional Ariel is confronted on the perceptions about Chile he has instilled in his family and his wife perceptively reads through his own self-deceptions to help dictate the direction of the novel. For a man who claims to be “ruthless” in pursuit of the truth, he has some pretty significant blindspots which only his family is able to draw attention to. The second piece here is the idea of being ruthless for the needs of the story. The novel is framed as a true story that Dorfman could only release after the death of Hortha—Ariel says he would not write about Hortha, and he keeps that promise until after Hortha dies. When Hortha asks, Ariel says Allende could only be written about after a hundred years. The contradiction is that, in Ariel’s words, “Someone might fictionalize him successfully, access a simulacrum of his thoughts and feelings, a simulacrum because it wouldn’t be Allende, but somebody else, a postmortem figment of the imagination. Even so, that novelist would have trouble. Allende’s story is so unbelievable that the result would probably reek of implausibility. Readers would protest that no, this could never have happened. [...] There would be scant room for the ambiguity and nuance that a novel demands. [...] Nothing should be sacred” (39-40). Yet, here we are, with a novel that is clearly about Hortha. Reading The Suicide Museum is surreal because even in its fictionality it feels so plausible that this might well be a memoir.

Of course, even the memoir’s truth-effect is called into question and rendered ambiguous. This crucial passage also identifies the motif of unfulfilled promises, both personal and political. Personal promises Ariel makes towards his wife, Hortha’s promises to not interfere with Ariel’s investigation, the promise of the Chilean revolution, and so on—all these are betrayed. Ariel tells Hortha that he’s “off-limits” and yet at the meta-level, this has clearly been betrayed. In Ariel’s defence, he says if he ever attempted such a literary experiment, he would have to be “brutal with my own self, merciless, ready to expose every weakness, invent weaknesses I don’t have. As long as it makes the book more interesting” (39). Even Ariel’s flaws may be “invented,” so there’s never the certainty Dorfman worries about for historical novels.

While this passage offers a map to the book, there are so many engaging moments that are hard to ignore. From the very beginning, the dynamic between Hortha and Ariel is compelling. The mystery that shrouds Hortha’s project is an effective hook that drew me in. The complicated relationship between them escalates naturally, and when Ariel consults with his wife on the project, she has a great moment of wisdom (actually, she may be the one character presented without flaws). She tells her husband, “This is what matters: he has to want this more than you do. Those are the rules of the game, of every game. In every relationship one of the parties wants something more than the other. And the one who wants it less gets the upper hand. So we’ll test him. See how engaged he really is, ready to bend over backward to get you on board” (133). The manipulation techniques that the two engage in add beautifully to the more espionage-y elements of the book. Later, Ariel and his wife run around playing detective and suspect they’re being followed. The two develop a plan where his wife engages in counter-spying and it’s maybe the most genre-fiction section of the book.

The book is an interesting project because it has the fun romp and thrills of a detective book, but has tonal shifts that are punishing—gruelling, even—that delve into more complex existential issues. I wish I could simply transcribe the entire outline of Hortha’s Suicide Museum. It goes on for pages and pages, not quite at the level of Bolaño’s 2666 but arguably more powerful. The entire process of walking through the museum is dispiriting and depressing as anything I’ve ever read. Yet, at the other side of the Suicide Museum is an optimism, or at least the potential for it. Reading through the Suicide Museum part is like a microcosm of the book itself—you get deeper and deeper into it, and it feels punishing, and then you come out on the other side with the message that we still have the potential to justify our lives by making life better for others.

Much of that motif emerges from Hortha’s experiences. He feels tremendous guilt over several formative moments in his life, and he recounts several times when he felt that he would commit suicide only to be spared by some miraculous sign. With a minor spoiler, Allende coming to power spared him at a pivotal moment. That said, though, the moment that most stands out to me is when Joseph fails to control himself in an interaction with bullies. For important context, Hortha was adopted during the Holocaust. I hope I remember this correctly, but following a school yard fight, his brother is actually taken and killed. He feels guilt over this, in spite of and maybe especially because his adoptive parents never fault him for it. That forms part of the impulse of having to justify his own life.

And yet even the truthfulness of our formative moments—the stories we tell ourselves—are not entirely reliable. Hortha notes,

“My adopted parents lied, explained it all away, claimed that Jan was arrested for having painted some obscenities on the Kommandant’s house on a dare, and that’s how I recalled it for years, they never made me feel responsible for that tragedy, they never said, We had a son and lost him because we treated you like a son, they never reproached me, they had taken me in willingly and continued to offer me warmth and love. Made it easy for me to mourn the loss of that elder brother as if I had no part in it, as if a tidal wave had swept him away, the earth had swallowed him, one more motive to hate the Nazis. So I never had to face what had been done to me, what I might have done to others, even less so after the war, when all people wanted was to forget the pain” (175).

The lingering guilt forms the backbone of many character motivations. Hortha feels guilt over this incident and also for working in plastics. There’s another fantastic moment in which Hortha catches a fish and discovers it filled with plastic: it’s a moment that he has to confront  his own guilt and it forms the basis of his environmental concerns later. For Ariel, he feels guilt towards his commitment towards Chile, or lack thereof, his self-imposed exile, his lack of success and recognition.

Throughout the book, characters have some wonderfully epiphanic moments in response to their internal guilt, one of my favourite being Hortha’s commentary on guilt itself. He describes a “moment of reckoning” (337). He says, “The whole of my life flashed in front of me, as if I were dying, as they say happens when you are about to die—and I was, in effect dying, the old me was dying. Things became crystal clear, what matters and what doesn’t. And at what matters, I had failed” (337). It’s a painful thing to experience, finally knowing what your priorities ought to be and simultaneously knowing that you haven’t succeeded. Hortha goes on to describe the guilt gnawing away at him: “That guilt made no sense [...] nothing I could have done to prevent the Nazis from … But you can’t argue with guilt. It devours reason” (337). In some ways, there’s a spirit in this book that defies reason. The bottomlessness of guilt is problematic and problematized: there’s a virtue in being ‘unreasonable.’ This unreasonable guilt makes Hortha “suppress” his painful memories, “and yet it must have persisted inside [him] driving [him] to make something of [himself], prove that [his] survival had been worthwhile” (337). It’s engaging to consider how we are formed by our mistakes, even when we don’t recognize them, and the idea of an unspoken undercurrent, an unconscious thread, is well-suited to a book about the ongoing ramifications of politics in Chile.

Hortha elevates the power of the imagination, that is, bringing those undercurrents to the surface. In describing his piscatorial epiphany, he recognizes that he needs to “make amends on an unheard-of scale” (340). He then talks about the spiritual experience and says it’s what authors and mystics experience “when caught in the fever of creativity” (340). He says, “The only way to save ourselves is to undo our civilization, unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for the last centuries. To remedy what I had wrought, I needed the colossal, monstrous power of the imagination, conceive something that would not succumb to the same deficiencies of the technical mind that had led us to this bottleneck” (340). In some ways, I see him as being involved in a similar project to Mark Fisher. He’s looking for an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to consumption and destruction. The moment is not without irony: a billionaire who made his money on plastics is the secret environmentalist hero. That’s all the more reason to double-down on the idea of justifying our lives by making other lives better. It seems unlikely that we have the imaginative faculties to compensate here. Jeez, this would also work with a Freudian reading surrounding guilt, the unconscious, and civilization and its discontents.

Before coming to the epilogue of the book, I just wanted to briefly comment on some brief details. For one, there’s another beautiful scene involving symbolic woodpeckers. Hortha’s mom is sick and continually perturbed by a noisy woodpecker. Hortha’s response is riveting and is really richly symbolic. The fact that the end of the book also presents two or three lengthy conflicting reports on Allende’s death is a wonderful culmination. The decision must be made, in some way a classic choice: tell the truth to your own detriment, or tell a lie that benefits all? The ethical ramifications are well-worth considering and deeply complex.

Despite all this darkness, though, I can’t write off The Suicide Museum as a depressing book. At its core, there’s a valuable optimism. Sure, the book is about the end of all life on the planet, but there are some conciliatory remarks in the epilogue. Ultimately, “we are not alone on this journey. In that brief moment of light we can hurt one another or we can alleviate the suffering, in that interval or interlude or flicker, there is the chance to fight the darkness. Even if we know how it will vanish, ourselves, this world, eventually the Universe itself. To relieve the pain of others, could that not be what justifies a birth we did not choose, gives meaning to the life that we stumble along as best we can, is that love not a consolation for the death that will come despite our best efforts to ignore its existence?” (651). I return here to the idea of classic literature. As fun as cynical novels can be, I think they won’t last. A book really needs to be edifying to last, it needs to have some kind of reason we should read it, and Dorfman presents some conclusions here. It’s not uncomplicated; I’m suspicious of the simply-stated moralism of the book, particularly because of the earlier passage which rejects unambiguous readings of history. Even so, it’s one of those fictions that is more helpful than the complex nuances of the full truth.

The epilogue takes place thirty years after the events of the book. At the end of the book, Dorfman is, regarding the death of Allende, “still unsure, after this exploratory voyage, of what the outcome is to be, with only this wake-up call of a novel as my small, sometimes serious, sometimes playful, contribution” (675). There’s a poetic conclusion that is self-reflective regarding the impact of literary works: “I will soon be dead. Swallowed by the solitude I feared as a child. Hoping only for the immortality of being a drop of water in a river that reaches the sea” (675). The focus on language really takes centre stage, where Dorfman breaks down the idea of an “epilogue” itself as logos (discourse, speech, word) and epi (in addition, in conclusion, also) (675). Even when the book is over, there is still more — and does that not reflect well on the idea that we can build something stronger by redeeming our own mistakes and improving things for others?

The epigraph is critical to the project of the book. The Suicide Museum resists definition, and the epigraph ensures that the final word has not yet been spoken—there is always more. It presents a future-focused ethos: “What future for humanity, who will write our epilogue, who will our descendants give thanks to? Like the ancient redwoods that sang to Joseph Hortha, Allende is still speaking to the future. The unborn are listening, calling out, calling out as if they were ancestors, for the avenues full of trees, the alamedas of tomorrow, to open” (676). It echoes to me the future-thinking of Indigenous people, who try to consider the impact of their actions for the next seven generations. The book here subverts the idea of an epilogue: an epilogue is not a statement on where things end, but instead serves as a new prologue—a call to action for our collective survival.

This is a book that will stick with me for quite some time. After all, as Dorfman writes, “The last word has not yet been said” (676).