Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

  It’s a little presumptuous for an author to position himself as a prophet or messiah, but such is Richard Bach’s ambition in Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. The slim volume has essentially three threads, each with the core focus on freedom, spirituality, and imagination. The first part of the book is a hand-written allegory where creatures cling to the bottom of a flowing river and one decides to let go and is swept away; other creatures see this creature flying by and see it as a miracle. The second narrative is a straightforward story of the main character, Richard Bach himself, as he flies from various towns and offers $3 plane rides to the citizens. He then meets Dan Shimoda, a man involved in the same project, but doing so after quitting his job as a messiah. Within the book, there are a number of excerpts from a messiah manual that serve as a complimentary set of aphorisms that lends the other sections an allegorical quality.

The central narrative focuses on Bach and Shimoda’s philosophical discussions and Bach trying to learn how to perform miracles like walking on water, swimming in land, making wrenches float, flying planes without having to refuel, and so on. One particularly strange event is when Shimoda conjures a vampire to scare Bach to force Bach to recognize that he should stand up for what he wants and not do anything he doesn’t feel like doing (i.e. give up his blood). Towards the end of the book, there’s a particularly polarizing conversation where Shimoda goes on the radio and insists that people don’t die unless they consent to dying (I can understand the outrage—try telling anyone being starved or bombed right now that they are only dying because they choose to). Then, Shimoda is murdered by an angry townsperson who shoots him with a shotgun. It’s implied that he can save himself but chooses not to.

I think the book is going to be controversial for its philosophical stances either way. There’s a deeply idealistic approach rather than a materialist one. Essentially, the book posits the idea that the entire world is an illusion and that we can manifest anything we want by thinking it. It’s similar to Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, but it’s much less obnoxious. Anything we want, we have. Any time we think we have problems, we do. As an example of one of the messiah handbook’s aphorisms reads as follows: “You are / never given a wish / without also being given the / power to make it true” (92). Another: “Your / conscience is / the measure of the / honesty of your selfishness. / Listen to it / carefully” (104). Bach’s book positions itself as a kind of guidebook, of course, but I think where things are controversial is that so much of the ‘manifestation’ philosophy of the book is individualistic and it doesn’t necessarily ring true—but of course, I’m a cynic. I just find it hard to believe that when there’s all the systemic issues that serve to disadvantage people that we can “imagine” our way out of it [Bach replaces the word “faith” with “imagination”]. There’s climate change, but we can just imagine the world is perfect and it is—and of course it is, because the world is an illusion.

One idea that is particularly hard to argue with is when Bach asks Shimoda why they go see a movie. Through a Socratic conversation, Shimoda guides Bach to the realization that for whatever justifications we have for doing things, it all comes down to either 1) having fun 2) learning things or 3) both. It’s reasonably persuasive that all of our actions fit into those categories.

In terms of style, the book is fine. The sentence construction is consistently clear and direct. The tone is somewhat aggrandizing, of course, given that the story focuses on two messiahs. There are actually a few moments of humour that land pretty well. There are some sarcastic comments that the central characters share that are nice touches, and as a huge fan of Arrested Development, there was a moment in the text that had a funny echo—certainly not one that Bach could have anticipated, but amusing nonetheless. When witnessing a miracle, Bach reflects on a moment where he interacted with a magician: “when I was a kid, learning magic – magicians say that! They carefully tell us, ‘Look, this is not a miracle you are about to see; this is not really magic. What it is, is an effect, it is the illusion of magic” (56). It reminds me of Gob constantly correcting people on calling magic tricks illusions: Illusion, Michael! or Illusions, dad! You don’t have time for my illusions.

Books serve different purposes. This book is more of a spiritual exercise than an aesthetic / literary venture, at least in my mind. The emphasis is predominantly on ideas presenting those ideas in little allegories, like when a wheelchair-bound man gets out of his chair and runs to the aeroplane because problems are only in our minds. As a result, I don’t have a ton of additional comments. I apologize if this review comes across as a little thin, but in my defence, the book is similarly thin.

It was okay. Will it revolutionalize my life? I’ll have to overcome my grounded realism and perpetually think about how the world is an illusion. I’ll just have to say: I’m no messiah and not likely to become one anytime soon.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

The Book of Form and Emptiness is an impossibly stupid book that insults reality and readers at every opportunity—not to mention Walter Benjamin. Every turn of the page tested my patience, not least of all because its bloated 546 pages found time for such riveting scenes as Annabelle receiving a massage and placing bids on eBay. It has repetitive scenes and descriptions, inconsistent characters, and offers embarrassing wish-fulfilment scenarios that contribute to discourse in a potentially harmful way. I dread the idea of spending more digital ink on something that was a huge sucky timesuck, but here we are.

It’s my own fault. I read the jacket in the store and it had a few details I thought were compelling. The summary highlights central character Benny’s ability to hear voices from objects like “a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce.” The premise offers so much poetic possibility and I was expecting something influenced by The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Coupled with the fact that Ruth Ozeki is listed as a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize—and we all know how much I love the Booker—I figured the book would be right up my alley.

Indeed, at the start, it offered a certain charm. In the early pages of the novel, Benny’s father Kenji dies in an alley on his way home. Benny’s mom Annabelle receives the news and if I recall correctly, there’s something amusing about it that she wants to tell Kenji, which of course she cannot, given that he is deceased. It’s a bittersweet moment that made me optimistic for the dynamic of the main characters.

It was probably after a hundred pages that I started to feel like the characters were irredeemably daft and that the plot was going nowhere. At one point, Annabelle asks Benny if he remembers the song “I’m a little teapot” and starts encouraging him to sing along with her in the kitchen. First of all, “I’m a little teapot” is not at all an obscure song. It’s embarrassing to think anyone wouldn’t remember it, and to sing it to your teenage son and ask him to sing along is a special level of hopelessness. Annabelle routinely makes poor decisions—and don’t get me wrong, flawed characters are expected—but it’s so repetitive and so unrealistic. Much of the book focuses on the fact that Annabelle hoards trash and so a significant portion of the novel tells the story of her acquiring things and rather than humanizing her it’s just irritating that I have to sit through the accumulation of her garbage, especially when she’s presented with too much authorial love and too little self-awareness. There are all kinds of moments where it seems to me she’s meant to be a saccharine TV mom who makes her little baby boy feel better and maybe the one realistic thing about it is that Benny goes into a rage at her for being so pathetic—she openly admits to not having friends, so she writes emails to the Zen Buddhist author of Tidy Magic, an obvious stand-in for Marie Kondo, who tells her life story in the book (which again, seems unrealistic for a self-help book about cleaning). 

I guess I should probably tell you about the actual plot of the book to contextualize why none of the characters even graze authenticity.

Here’s the short form. Benny’s dad dies. Annabelle hoards. Benny hears voices from objects. Scissors tell him to stab the teacher. He stabs himself. Insitutionalized. Meets friends. Gets out of institution. Skips school to go to library. Meets friends. Something something. Has a breakdown. Meanwhile: Annabelle curates the news? [in 2016 she’s taking newspaper clippings? What? Who is commissioning this archive]. Maybe is going to lose her job. Doesn’t. Maybe is going to lose her job. Does. Landlord wants to evict them. Benny has a book that narrates his life to him and tells him what is happening in other peoples’ lives (Book also narrates parts / has dialogue with Benny for us to er… enjoy?). Child Protective Services are called. Annabelle has to clean her house. Benny goes to a riot. Gets institutionalized again. The library cleans Annabelle’s house. Everything gets better.

Okay, so now back to why none of the characters ring true. They’re all hopelessly idyllic in various ways. For instance, Benny falls for the cool girl at the Children’s hospital. He’s like 13 and she’s 18, if I’ve done the math correctly. She’s an addict, seemingly heroin given that she has track marks on her arms. He first meets her in the institution. Her thing is painstakingly reproducing typewriter font on little slips of paper (so hip) and leaving them around for people to find as little instructions (so artsy). Clues lead Benny to various books in the library (come on, do you know the odds of finding a note in the right book in a place that has thousands of books?). Anyway, when he sees her for the first time again he doesn’t recognize her because she has piercings. Seems unlikely but ok. But then we get re-introduced to her and she’s too impossibly hip, like every stereotype in a teen movie gets wrapped into one: she’s got piercings, she has a tattoo of a sideways anarchy sign and goes by the name The Aleph after the Jorge Borges short story, she has her performance art project of leaving notes in places, she reads Walter Benjamin and fights capitalism, and she has a nonbinary ferret that lives between her breasts and is named TAZ for Temporary Autonomous Zone. Laughable. The one thing I do like, despite myself, is that she has a hobby of making post-apocalyptic anti-capitalistic snowglobes where bills whirl around in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (for example) to show corporate profiteering on climate disaster. It’s on the nose, but it’s a fun concept—of course, she gives it up after showing them to Benny because she realizes snowglobes are just more trash: “It’s just more stuff. More junk, cluttering up the world. The B-man [this is her companion Slavoj, Bottleman] says we have to learn to love our trash and find poetry in it, and that’s true, but there’s enough useless crap already without me adding more” (251).

Bottleman, her companion, is even worse. Remember, Benny is about 13. She is about 18. Their other bestie is an old homeless man who is wheelchair-bound with a prosthetic leg, an illustrious poetry career, and a problem with alcoholism. It’s particularly unrealistic that people have read his poetry and that confers him special privileges with security. The fact that these people hang out at all is ridiculous, much less that they all get along beautifully—Slavoj even forces the young boy to drink with him while asking the big questions about life! Hooray?

The introduction to Slavoj is so [expletive-ly] stupid that even in the cringiest movie imaginable it would be laughed onto the cutting room floor. Benny is skipping school to go to the library and the staff are giving him a hard time. Slavoj miraculously senses this young man wanting to get into the library and arranges a plan:

“I hef a plan,” he whispered hoarsely. “You must stay back. I vill enter first and deploy diversionary tactics at ze book returns. Once I hef sufficiently distracted ze security forces, you must slip quickly past.”

[...]

“It is a good plan, ya? Then we vill rendezvous in Parapsychology on Level Four, at oh-nine-hundred hours.” The old hobo gunned his wheelchair. The massy assemblage of plastic bags filled with empty cans and bottles seemed to have grown since the last time Benny had seen it and now was billowing around the old man like a thundercloud. A tall pole with an orange safety flag rose from its midst like a golf flag or a lance.

Benny glanced around. He was trying so hard not to be conspicuous, and this was a disaster.

[...]

The hobo pumped his fist in the air. “Seizzzzze ze day!” he hissed, sending a spray of spittle flying, and then he spun a wheelie and took off.

The wheelchair careened through the crowd and up the access ramp, shopping bags bouncing, flag flapping from the end of its pole. Benny watched, wondering if he should turn around and leave, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and since he couldn’t stand there loitering, he followed, walking slowly. (158)

I’ll spare you the rest of the excerpt and just summarize. The distraction is that Slavoj starts putting empty bottles in the book-return slot. Okay, one more thing: “‘Slavoj, you know that slot is just for books,’” the librarian was saying, not unkindly. “‘Not bottles. Right?’” (158). Even he is infantalized. Anyway, Benny sneaks by past security. I’m not sure it’s ever addressed how he manages to go back day after day after day. Surely they’re not running the same diversion repeatedly. When Benny gets into the library, he looks back: “The hobo, Slavoj, had his back turned to him. There was no way he could have seen Benny behind him, but just as he passed, the old man pumped his prosthetic leg in the air overhead as if in salute. As if he knew the boy was watching” (159). Insert Judd Nelson freeze frame and then give me a break.

Slavoj is an obvious stand-in for Slavoj Žižek. Playing up his hobo-like appearance is pretty on-the-nose, but the only redeemable thing is that Ozeki is able to reproduce what could very well be a passage in a Žižek piece; when Slavoj tries to use the book return slot for bottles, he says, “I hef become somewhat intrigued by this notion of a slot. That a slot is a thing, we cannot deny, however it is a thing defined entirely by lack, by an absence of form, by negative space, by its own emptiness” (159). It’s a moment where Ozeki does a little more than pay lip service to the intellectuals that underscore the book (sorry, Benjamin—you really got roped in here) and engage with them on their terms. You can see the through-line from Lacan to Žižek to the fictionalized Slavoj: “We know vat it isn’t, but how can we truly know vat it is? How can we tell ze difference between a slot  and, say, a slit? Is a slit slimmer than a slot, and therefore lacking less? If it lacks less, does it vant more? And if so, how can we know if this slot or slit vants books and not bottles?” (159). Incidentally, Alice [sorry, The Aleph] considers naming her snowglobe “The Desert of the Real” and I find it impossible not to think there’s a connection to Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, itself stolen from The Matrix.

So, some of the central cast of characters are ridiculously detached from reality, but even bit-part characters are just not sensible. After an election (presumably Trump’s), Benny finds himself in the middle of a riot for no reason other than following the hum. Some things happen and then he goes to the Bindery in the library (a place he’d once been before and injured himself on a book cutter). Annabelle calls the library to see if he’s there. The librarian decides to ignore the message and then go home, but oh wait she can’t sleep so she calls the security guard at the library and makes him search various rooms (why have this at all?---she could have been the one to look). He finds Benny in the Bindery and she asks if he’s alright. The security guard suggests everything is fine, but he finds Benny sitting naked, singing “row, row, row your boat”, sitting with his head under the book cutter blade. He tells the librarian he’ll have to call it in. She tells him to wait and she’d be there soon. So they don’t call the police. She shows up and they watch, but she doesn’t call his mother. Presumably they do at some point, but instead we just have a period of time where Benny is sitting with the blade over his head—but don’t worry, he’s not in any danger. Give me another, bigger break.

Even Benny’s character is inconsistent. He’s not smart enough to know how to spell “principal” correctly, but has the knowledge of how to set up a dummy e-mail account, hack into his mom’s e-mail (granted, guessing her password is embarrassingly simple), set up a filter, and forward any new e-mail from his school IP address to go to the dummy account and delete from his mother’s main account. Ozeki wants it both ways: she wants the precious little boy that can win our hearts and be saved by the noble Annabelle, but also the rebellious teenager who gets into misadventures like going to the park and meeting guys that give him free drugs and then hit him in the head with a baseball bat. K.

I think I could let a lot of the unreality of the book slide if it didn’t create such unrealistic and harmful expectations. To me, Benny reads as autistic-coded. I’m not a medical professional, but to me it seems like his hyperfixations and inability to cope with noises are key indicators. Of course, he is also maybe schizophrenic, given his auditory hallucinations. I understand not wanting to pin things down precisely, but the way Ozeki portrays him feels exploitative. As I said, she makes it so that he can be either 4 or 14 depending on what she needs him for. Moreover, it romanticizes his lack of wellness. For that matter, Ozeki romanticizes poverty and addition, too, by having such a happy-go-lucky trio of misfits (again—is an old man really hanging out with a 13 year old taking shots in a library bathroom?). I’m not saying there’s no joy for people who are poor or have mental illnesses. People living in poverty or with mental illness can have and maintain friendships, but this particular combination makes it seem like everyone’s in it together having a good time; Ozeki doesn’t seriously or meaningfully engage with the challenges people face and instead uses their situations as a vehicle to explore more esoteric themes, like the power of books or language. I just think that her own priority to edify literature and books like her own supersedes the material needs of and realistic societal expectations for people who actually exist. Not all books need to be doom and gloom, but because the characters are essentially cartoons it just feels like they’re being used rather than explored empathetically, authentically, and sincerely.

Thus, the end of the book comes across as saccharine slop as well. I neglected to mention there’s a whole section where the existence of The Aleph (Alice) and Bottleman (Slavoj) are called into question. Benny’s psychiatrist says they’re made up, which is pretty odd given that both Annabelle and Benny have interacted with Alice. [What’s weirder is that one of the conflicts in the book is about Benny moving around a fridge magnet poem that Kenji had written and Annabelle getting really mad about it—but he didn’t do it. Alice sees Annabelle doing it (as a sleepwalking poet, I suppose) and this never gets addressed.] Anyway, eventually Annabelle encounters Alice and the two immediately have a heart-to-heart where Alice is just suddenly open with her. It’s not realistic for a teenage anarchist, but whatever. So then Annabelle asks Alice to go with her to the psychiatrist to prove that she exists (as if this negates other very real symptoms Benny has experienced?). It’s pretty silly. But then the psychiatrist knows Alice. Has treated her. You’re telling me that she would have NO knowledge of her patients that she could make a connection between them? What kind of terrible psychiatrist is she?

The ending of their storyline feels unearned. The bond between Annabelle and Alice seems unrealistic. Further, so much hinges on Annabelle being able to clean up her house. She has to clean up her trash in order to avoid eviction and ensure that Benny isn’t taken away by Child Protective Services. The entire book is her battling with this necessity to clean but refusal to give up the past. The solution is that the librarian gathers a bunch of volunteers that throw things out for her. I’m left feeling that Annabelle hasn’t actually grown; there’s some kind of facile platitudes about how she realizes the error of her ways, but I don’t think stopping toxic habits are quite so simple.

The situation is even less plausible with Benny and his mental illnesses. At the climax of the book, Benny is confined to a wheelchair because he can’t convince his feet to move. He’s also mute. There’s a lot of complex issues at work within him, but those issues are solved by magic. When he hears that his mom is struggling, he simply wills himself better, gets up from his wheelchair, and asks to use the telephone to call her. If only mental health were that easy.

At least there’s some minor restraint where Ozeki misdirects the audience. The Marie Kondo stand-in is filming a TV show in the states and it builds towards the idea of her filming Annabelle and Benny. She doesn’t. Even the book recognizes how saccharine that would be. They do still meet, though, at the library where Benny hangs out and they have a funeral for Kenji and it’s whatever. Fine. I guess that begs the question why we spent forty pages building up to the fake Marie Kondo solving everything.

Essentially, the book is magic realism, but with no realism and half the magic. Put simply, I’m unimpressed and frustrated with how many hours I sunk into this one. It’s still going to sit on my shelf because I’m a book hoarder that won’t learn my lesson (do I see too much of myself in Annabelle?). Just don’t expect me to open it again any time soon.

P.S. Let me just ask that we retire the trope of autistic-coded young men whose dads have died so they spend time exclusively with their moms. Jonathan Safran Foer already did it so let's just all accept it.

The Penguin Book of Short Stories edited by Jhumpa Lahiri

        Let’s begin with my obligatory note about the challenge of offering reviews for anthologies: given the diversity of the content within any themed collection—and the vast amount of content not included in it (and of that, the majority being unfamiliar to me personally)—who am I to decide whether the collection is representative? Inevitably, my commentary can only be limited, my review incomplete. Second disclaimer: I read this book over more than a year in small bursts of a story or two at a time, so it is not the most fresh in my mind.

Disclaimers stated, I next have to state my admiration for the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri. First of all, it’s clear that she has an immense knowledge of and passion for Italian literature, given the depth and breadth of the selections. Lahiri’s editorial voice is also as illuminating as it is engaging. For instance, the introduction to the book discusses the way fascism attempted to control language in Italy, like through the rejection of words imported from the Spanish, in work for publication. Those historical details are interspersed throughout the prefatory remarks for each of the authors in the collection, which helps to weave a grander narrative around the individual pieces. Moreover, Lahiri’s introductions to the authors themselves are brief and, often, deeply engaging. She has a knack for highlighting the elements of the work in a way that compels me to read more of each authors’ works, even in situations where the selected story didn’t specifically touch me. The literary portraits are themselves rich works of literary biography worth reading.

There are more stories in the collection than would be worth counting for the review, but an early standout in the collection is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s mythical story “The Siren.” Incidentally, there is a motif of mythical creatures throughout the collection, which also appear in Primo Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris.” Some of the more magical and surreal stories stand out as the highlights of the collection. For instance, “And Yet They Are Knocking…” by Dino Buzzati was one of my favourites, in which an aristocratic family stays in their home amid rumours of a flood. One of the central characters gives away dog statues, which are then seen being claimed by someone the other character deems unworthy. While they discuss it, various servants enter to warn them of the rising water levels and they live in willful ignorance. It’s one of those stories that reads as a cautionary tale with rich allegorical layers, but with the added touch of the Kafkaesque. It was great, like a bizarre and suspenseful stage play or Kaufmann film. 

Perhaps the strangest and most amusing story in the collection is Tommaso Landolfi’s “Gogol’s Wife.” The story centers the narrative on the historical literary figure Nikolai Gogol and focuses on his relationship with his wife, who, very unhistorically, is a balloon. Yes, you read that right. Gogol is married to a balloon, and Landolfi’s tone is completely deadpan. Every character just accepts that Gogol is married to a balloon, and when he gets mad he wants to deflate her, and the story builds towards a popping. It would be a narrative well-adapted into film by an art-house director. Everything about it was so weird and yet so human. It’s even funnier if you do some cursory research and find that Gogol was never married and that people have criticized his writing of women as being “impossibly virtuous” or witches, which adds to the rich absurdity of him being such a monster to his inflatable wife.

Beyond the strange, in many cases, Lahiri’s editorial choices tend toward stories of failed dreams and disappointed expectations, particularly when it comes to women and, even more specifically, their married lives. One especially moving story is “A Pair of Eyeglasses” by Anna Maria Ortese, which is about a girl needing glasses and her family spending an immense sum to cover her prescription. Everyone talks about the girl’s prospects being virtually nil—with glasses only making it worse. It’s a gorgeously written Bildungsroman that considers wealth and beauty and a loss of perspective, and it’s particularly powerful because Ortese’s style is replete with stunning imagery, especially following when the central character gets her glasses, which is such a lovely stylistic flare. I consistently appreciate when a writer immerses you in the experience of characters by playing with style, and this story is a masterful delivery.

Stories like “The Milliner” by Antonio Delfini and “My Husband” by Natalia Ginzburg explore the married life of women through a particularly depressing lens. In the former, a young girl with dreams of starting her own fashion house finds herself subject to the support and subsequent abandonment of Arturo. Her dreams of him bound to her ambitions, the ending of the story feels like a particularly sad state of affairs. Things don’t get much better for married life. In the story “My Husband”, the main character and her husband have a tepid relationship. She clings to him despite his continual lack of interest in her. He is particularly flat when expressing his affection for her, so while the words may be intended to express love, it comes across more like that song from My Fair Lady: “I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” However, the husband maintains an affair with another woman and is honest with his wife. As much as she tried to train him out of it, he returns to making love in the woods with his mistress and she becomes pregnant. The final pages of the story are a riveting climax. The husband, a doctor, is meant to deliver his mistress’ baby. Meanwhile, the wife is enlisted by the midwife to help. I am tempted not to spoil the ending, but it’s just too compelling: the mistress and child die during childbirth and the husband dies shortly after, leaving the wife on her own to go wheresoever she pleases. What makes Ginzburg’s story so powerful is the conflicted emotions and position of the wife at the end of the story. She discusses her pleasure at the death of the mistress and revels in it, and then when her husband dies she finds herself free but unable to think of where she wants to go. It’s a finely wrought psychological and emotional conclusion to a story that just feels me with depressing dread.

“Silence” by Aldo Palazzeschi is a similar depressing story of an increasingly misanthropic and reclusive man, who speaks less and less and, after the death of his father, hardly utters “yes” or “no.” We are aligned with his housekeeper, who puts in relentless effort to meet his particular needs and tastes. One day, Benedetto Vai begins returning home with packages—an unusual, rather an unheard of, gesture. Leonia feels a deep resentment, knowing that he must have spoken to someone about the price of his purchase. Having worked for him for years, “She felt tricked, deeply violated. And for the first time she felt like the victim of a madman. It had not been a deep-seated necessity arising from his nature and spirit that had led him to such extremes after all, but an intriguing experience, the caprice of a lazy man, a game conjured up by an empty mind, a joke in very bad taste” (166). The sense of betrayal that he could open his mouth for such a senseless purchase and not talk to her is a painful one. The irony, too, that a misanthrope purchases wine glasses, offers a particularly bitter sting. Benedetto Vai continues to buy ostentatious glasses and cutlery while succumbing to some kind of illness. He spends his days rearranging the cabinet and admiring it until he becomes bedridden. When he is about to die, Leonia performs a final act of service by setting the table with all of the glasses. Benedetto Vai stares at her and continues to glance towards the door and the story ends with an ethereal image: “Someone came in as lightly as mist, and so white as to be indistinguishable from the air. Only Benedetto Vai was able to make out the pale apparition that advanced from the door to the festively laid table which was being fixed for all eternity in those wide blue eyes” (170). There’s a lot in the story to grapple with, and Palazzeschi captures our internal contradictions nicely.

Some of the stories take a more surprising turn with respect to relationships. In particular, “The Other Side of the Moon” highlights a woman who has an affair with a gangster. They plan crime together and the life they plan seems so full of promise, but by the end of the story, she realizes that he’s no better than her husband and walks out on him. The ending provides a bizarre twist that highlights the impossibility of being in business with criminals. 

The subtext of many of the pieces reflect the conflicted political history of Italy, as well. I think the best story in that respect is “Invitation to Dinner” by Alba de Céspedes. In that story, a decorated British diplomat comes to dinner with an Italian couple in the postwar period. It’s a story that highlights the dramatic tensions following World War II, where conflicted emotions surrounding the defeat of fascism and the resentment towards Britain’s self-appointed superiority exist in uneasy connection, which plays out at the micro level in the dinner party in a tense, seemingly prolonged meal. It is not a story that gives easy political answers; it is a story that recreates the discomfort and lets you sit in it, and I really liked that.

A number of the later stories in the collection deal with twist endings in various forms, “The Smell of Death” by Beppe Fenoglio and Antonio Delfini’s “The Milliner” among them. In both, there are surprising deaths that provide the climax with a dramatic force to punctuate the tale. “The Smell of Death” in particular establishes some rich imagery and symbolism for a fight between men and the disapproving spectator / love interest. There’s a wonderfully ominous quality to the story, but not without its own tenderness. The remorse Carlo feels after fighting Attilo seems to linger in the air—like the smell of death.

Speaking of the smell of death, Silvio D’Arzo’s story “Elegy for Signora Nodier” is a pretty strange little tale that highlights a taxidermied dog that was the beloved’s when he was alive. There’s a sort of amicable-seeming love triangle, but by the end of the story there’s a dognapping, (not a dog napping), and years later the dog appears embalmed in one of the women’s apartments. It’s a bizarre story where I found myself reading the end several times just to let it marinate. I quite liked it.

Beyond these, a number of the stories were quite enjoyable. For instance, there is a selection of vignettes by Giorgio Manganelli that would be interesting to explore further: his book is called Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels [how great is that title!]. As I’ve mentioned, Lahiri really knows how to sell works. There were a number of other stories worth reading that haven’t made it into this review—and I fear I haven’t done the collection justice anyhow—but I can’t help but feel that my experience would be much improved by reading full collections of these authors’ works. You don’t realize how powerfully adapting to a writer’s voice can improve your experience of their work overall until you find them presented in rapid succession, longing for more time to connect with them before moving on.

In any case, if you’re in the market for short stories, I think The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories has a lot to offer. I imagine the collection is curated with university courses in mind. It addresses a number of the major touchstones of literary criticism; you’ll find stories that connect directly to feminism, new historicism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. As different as the stories can be, there nonetheless remain those subterranean threads that compel us to find the connections that link a tradition together. Lahiri has seen them, and hopefully she’ll make you see them too.

    Happy reading!

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

    There are times that books call your name. Some Minor Detail stands out and draws you in. In the case of Adania Shibli’s novel, I’m not sure what it was: it’s a thin volume, a black spine with white text, and completely unassuming on the shelf. Yet, in perusing the collection at The Bookshelf it called to me and when I read the back it was surprisingly contemporaneous. It’s a novel about life under occupation in Palestine with one narrative taking place in 1949 and one a number of years later.

As you can imagine, the book is steeped in controversy. 

I’ll first provide a short summary of its reception that I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia. The book was published in Arabic in 2016, but received an English translation in 2020. When the English translation was published, it seemed to be met with a slew of positive reviews. Shibli’s novel was the finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and then it was selected for the LiBeratupreis in Germany following a German translation in 2022. Before the Frankfurt Book Fair, the organization LitProm cancelled the awards ceremony, and postponed it to an unspecified date. The rationale was the “war between Israel and Hamas.” There was an outcry from a number of public intellectuals and they wrote an open letter in defence of Palestinian writers. On the other side of the coin, some of the LitProm jurors objected to the book who claimed it was “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic.”

I can see some people objecting to the book as being anti-Israel because the soldiers don’t come across very well. The entire first half of Minor Detail is about Israeli soldiers patrolling the desert a year after 700, 000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948. The soldiers come across a group of Bedouins and proceed to slaughter them, leaving only a young teenage girl alive. I’ll allow you the sorrow of your own imagination to determine what this group of soldiers did to her before murdering her, too. So, yes, Israel does not come across particularly well in this work of fiction. Except, well, this happened.

In the second half of the novel, the unnamed Palestinian narrator goes looking for information on the case, compelled to investigate because of the strange parallel that it happened on the same day as her birth, twenty-five years earlier. Readers then witness the lengths she has to go to find information, including obtaining false papers so that she can pass through checkpoints, and eventually, seemingly, being killed by Israeli soldiers on patrol (though the ending of the book does not explicitly state that). Again, it’s not as if events like this have never happened, so to claim that the book is anti-Israel is maybe the case insofar as the realities of Israeli occupation are anti-humanitarian.

As a literary work, I think the content of the book and its style compliment each other beautifully to evoke the oppressive feeling and the dread of living under occupation. There are certain motifs that recur and repeat again and again, making it feel like there is no escape and no alternative. For instance, the book continually refers to white soap suds, crushing insects, sand clinging to grass, the smell of gasoline, dust, bug bites, and so on. Add to that the blazon of place names and maps to see the disorienting and oppressive reality for the central character. As she navigates to a place long-gone, she pulls out a slew of Palestinian maps and Israeli maps and finds them in contradiction. There are long lists of names, past and present, that make the distance feel interminable, even more so since the village she’s seeking has likely been destroyed.

There’s also a sense of anonymity that pervades the text. None of the characters are named, which I find yields simultaneous and diverging effects. For instance, in not naming the girl who is raped and murdered, she is not given the dignity of human life. When the narrator in the second section is described in somewhat parallel terms, the anonymity gives them a sense of affinity—because both are somewhat lacking in their identities, they are more connected (and more than just because of her birth date). As for the Israeli soldiers and the other Israelis the second narrator encounters, their lack of identity seems to imbue them with the cold banality of evil. 

The other piece of this is the permeability or non-permeability of borders. The narrator for the second half of the book notes that she has an “inability [...] to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically” (59). That mindset proves infectious. There are descriptions that seem like there’s no border between past and present, and you know rationally that it wouldn’t be possible, and yet… For example, there’s an Israeli man who runs a museum and when the narrator asks him about his past, he talks about finding a girl in the desert when he was a soldier and you know it wouldn’t be him—the time frame doesn’t seem right—but it’s tempting to think that that barrier between identity has been eradicated (especially since they have no names). There’s a barking dog in the first section. There’s a barking dog in the second section. It’s tempting to believe it’s the same dog that has some sort of knowledge of circumstances—but of course, this is impossible unless the dog is a new record holder for age.

Minor Detail trains you to be perceptive to little details, potentially to a disorienting effect. In the same passage about the inability to identify borders, the narrator continues as follows:

[it] leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes. And it is possible, at first glance, to mock this tendency, which could compel someone, after the building next to their office at their new job is bombed, to be more concerned about the dust that was created by the bombing and that landed on their desk than about the killing of the three young men who had barricaded themselves inside, for instance. But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence. (59)

This is one of those “master key” passages that gives you a way of approaching the text. As alluded to above, the second half of the book starts with the narrator going to her new job. She goes to the building for the first time and someone opens a window to prevent it from shattering when the bombs drop. She finds herself irritated by the dust from that building that lands on her hand, and it’s those small obsessions that distracts from the the big picture, as she notes in her narration. She describes the “dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting” as the nuanced, precise attention to detail. While she diminishes their importance, it is also revelatory of an ethical imperative. Consider, for instance, how many young people have been murdered in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the narrator is focused on one particular death, one particular girl, and her entire journey is intent on one minor detail.

There’s a convergence of aesthetics and ethics here. In considering the fly shit on the painting, the narrator continues that “There are even art historians who make these same claims. All right, they don’t exactly claim to notice fly shit on a painting, but they do make a point of focusing on the least significant details, not the most significant ones, in order to determine, for example, whether a painting is an original or a copy” (59). There is an interaction between the forest and the trees and their inseparability seems to be the focus here. For the most fundamental issues to be determined (is it an original or a copy?), we can only arrive at that by focusing on the minutiae. “Forgers,” she continues, “pay attention to major, significant details, like the roundness of the subject’s face or the position of the body, and these they reproduce precisely. However, they rarely pay attention to little details like earlobes or fingernails or toenails, which is why they ultimately fail to perfectly replicate the painting” (59). There’s a reading of the world that cares for that which is least significant, paradoxically being the most significant. 

Hence, the details of the book are of utmost importance. There are a number of symbols, metaphors, and allegorical readings involved. For instance, the girl’s murder takes place on the narrator’s birthday—as though her death is the ‘birth’ of the second woman. I’m sure there’s a parallel there to how acts of violence give ‘birth’ to their resistance. At the symbolic level, there’s a number of details related to animals and animality. In the first section, there’s a dog that persistently barks (a symbol of conscience? guilt?). There’s also a section where the main soldier is bitten by a bug and his leg becomes increasingly infected and painful. It seems to be symbolic of his own personal guilt and his own loss of humanity. His response to finding bugs in his room is then to crush all of them, going around destroying every one of these nuisances. It’s also telling that when they first come across the girl in the desert after murdering everyone in her group, including their camels, she is described as a beetle. 

Another recurring motif is that of sand, and in particular its ability to absorb that which is around it. For instance, there’s a chilling moment after the Bedouins are killed where Shibli lingers on blood in the sand. The sand sucks up the blood and darkens but then it disappears. Later, when the soldier is spraying the girl down, again the water is absorbed into the sand. There’s an implication that the landscape absorbs life; there’s also the implication that the historical landscape of Israel-Palestine comes from the blood of others. In another chilling detail, when the Bedouins are murdered, the camels are killed and there’s a clump of grass with sand still clinging to it. It’s an evocative image, charged with meaning, with layers of being uprooted, of clinging for dear life, and so on.

There are subterranean connections that operate in that image, in particular. Later in the book, the narrator says, “one cannot rule out the possibility of a connection between the two events, or the existence of a hidden link, as one sometimes finds with plants, for instance, like when a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you’ve got rid of it entirely, only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century later” (60-61). I find the premise compelling. In a clever narrative technique, the second narrator describes things that we know about that are completely inaccessible to her. She would never have known about the camel clutching the grass, and here she is narrating something inexplicably similar. I think the suggestion here, too, is that the imperative toward eradication is a doomed venture—impossible to fully remove the subterranean links that bring people together across time and space, “trespassing borders once again” (61).

Where the message becomes less obvious is when echoes exist between characters that would have a more unlikely connection. Shibli lingers on the soap suds that whiten the girl’s body when she is being hosed down like an animal. Shibli then provides a scene of the soldier shaving and it lingers once more on the white soap suds on his skin. Why is it that the soldier and his victim are brought into this mysterious identification?

When actively seeking answers and trying to find connection, the second narrator experiences a series of challenges. It’s a halting kind of narrative. There are blockades and heightened tension of her not knowing whether she’ll be able to pass or if some serious harm will befall her. One of the most powerful lines in the book comes from the journey out. She describes driving the car she rented to investigate this half-a-decade-old murder, noting that as she tries to start the engine, “what appears to be a spider begins spinning its threads around me, tightening them into something like a barrier, impenetrable if only because they’re so fragile” (64). The next line is again one of the most crucial “key passages” of the book: “It’s the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier” (64).

As the narrator repeatedly notes, she defies barriers—but this can serve as a disadvantage. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator has been driving around all day and ‘spill[s] some gasoline on [her] hands and pants” (92). I felt an immediate dread. Gas—first of all, that potentially flammable material that now coats her—is referenced earlier in the novel in an ominous way. The girl that is murdered smells of gasoline when the soldier first rapes her. The smell is so offensive to him, actually, that he turns his head away. [Sidenote here: this would be a good opportunity to re-read Slavoj Zizek’s Violence, which has a section about how we are willing to accept strangers until we can smell them on the bus.] The girl is also covered in gasoline prior to her death.

For the narrator to be covered in gasoline evokes a terrible dread. Again, it’s the minor details—-the echoes—-that, if you read them, mean the most. The narrator describes being covered in the smell of gasoline racing ahead of her. As she gets closer to the Nirim settlement where these events took place, she seems to be aligned more and more with the girl. There’s then a stilted narration of the route to get there and all the blocks in place that prevent you from getting there in the most direct fashion. As she is increasingly drawn into the past and aligned with the victim from 1949, you can feel the danger increase, which is why the ending of the book feels so ominous. Her investigation into the past is halted when she notices Israeli soldiers and tries to act inconspicuous before being, presumably, shot to death, perhaps in the same location as the former victim.

When paying attention to very minor details, the slight changes seem even more significant. Nowhere is this more emblematic than when dust comes in the window from the bombing and irritates her to a bombing later in the book. In a different context, the following passage appears:

Bombing sounds very different depending on how close one is to the place being bombed, or how far. The rumblings from  this shelling aren’t strong at all, and the noise isn’t unsettling; rather, it’s a deep, heavy sound, like a languorous pounding on a massive drum. And the bombs causing it don’t shake the building I’m in, even though the walls are thin and made of light wood; they don’t shatter the glass, even though the windows are closed. And when I get out of bed and open the windows, the room isn’t filled with a thick cloud of shuddersome dust; instead, what sneaks inside is the soft, tender air of dawn. I keep listening, my ears trained to the sound of repeated bombings, and I feel a strange closeness with Gaza, as well as a desire to hear the shelling from nearby, and to touch motes of dust from the buildings being bombed. The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar, and how impossible it will be to return. (94)

I have very little to say about this particular quotation, other than the fact that it is representative of Shibli’s distinct style. One reviewer described it as “controlled,” and I think that is actually the perfect description. Every detail matters and gives life. Every detail is a step toward justice.

And it is in the dust that we find our strange closeness. May we cultivate that closeness and overcome together.