The Punishment by Joseph Dandurand

Back in December, I was in Whistler B.C. and stumbled across Joseph Dandurand’s collection of poems, The Punishment, and was immediately engaged by its cover art. At the time I picked it up, I was thoroughly entrenched in an additional qualifications course about First Nations, Indigenous, and Métis cultures. I didn’t feel up to the task of taking on additional related reading over and above my studies (Dandurand is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation), but after some time passed, The Punishment called to me from my unread shelf and it was, as expected, pretty darn heavy.

The Punishment is a collection of poems written with clear and accessible language, many in a narrative form in the register of fables or Indigenous stories. The poems address the traumas of colonialism head-on, and going through the collection provides an intimate portrait of the artist’s life. The poems address the legacy of residential schools, given that his mother was in one and has religious trauma that is passed along to Dandurand and exacerbated by his time at Catholic school. Incidentally, several of the poems address Dandurand’s experiences being bullied and getting into fights at school. Some of the poems address his teenage and adult years, specifically in his experience with addiction and mental illness, including time spent in an institution. In the final section of the collection, there are more poems about Dandurand’s writing career and his family life, raising two children and losing his ex to an overdose. As I said, pretty darn heavy.

I think it’s pretty common for people with significant trauma to return to the sources of their pain as an attempt to process and move forward. As a personal project, then, I hope The Punishment helps to engage in the act of healing. As an aesthetic project—at the risk of sounding unkind—I think The Punishment needed some editing. The collection is just under 150 pages, which is somewhat long for a poetry collection as is, and I felt that the subject matter got a little repetitive. There’s a fine balance that’s hard to pinpoint—poets often deal with the same themes over and over, but when specific anecdotes are repeated it seems like a missed opportunity to cull to the most effective poems.

That being said, there are some dimensions that I thought were particularly compelling. For instance, there were poems about residential schools, but the real drama is in their legacy. One poem recounts an arson at a Church, which was both contemporaneous and a finely wrought narrative scene. A few of the poems address Dandurand’s mother’s experience at residential school, which is painful enough to witness, but the depiction of intergenerational trauma is what is most powerful. Dandurand’s mother clearly had an awful experience at the schools but nonetheless grows to love the Lord and pushes her young son to accept God, too. It’s such an interesting tension between having compassion for her and being incensed at her treatment of her son, and the way Dandurand constructs the situation across multiple poems is excellent.

My favourite moment in the collection, bar none, comes in the poem “Sinking In.” The build-up to the moment is a direct address to those who, like me, dare to paraphrase other peoples’ stories. He writes, “When I walk away, do not stare at me / to turn and tell differently the words / that I have carried on my back since I was five” (29). The line is appropriate to the moment recounted in anecdote, but also seems to stand in for all victims of abuse, especially Indigenous victims of abuse, whose stories are recycled by White audiences like myself. What am I doing? Rather than sharing the words as they are written, I am summarizing and commenting and inserting myself where I don’t belong. Setting the politics of that aside for a second, the passage I just quoted continues with a brilliantly constructed line break: “that I have carried on my back since I was five / and the first cold touch of a priest destroyed me / into the man I am today” (29). Ending the line about the priest on the words “destroyed me” encompasses a whole world, but the addition of “destroyed me / into the man I am today” is great inversal of how we normally think of our identities. We are made into the men we are; to frame that as a destruction is replete with layers of thoughtfulness. It implies so much in just a few words, reversing our usual thinking that we progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood. That one phrase makes the collection. 

In examining the long-term effects of childhood trauma, Dandurand’s poem “The Parade” provides a narrativized experience of life in an institution. He narrates how they are provided with cotton slippers and lose them. The painting of the inmates is not at all flattering; it paints them as drooling and slipperless and yet provides them with the human dignity we are all afforded: “we all are, yes, / we are all worth saving in one way or another” (102). Dandurand looks at the parade of medicated people and recognizes that he will eventually join their ranks. One of the stanzas offers an interesting inversion, dozens of pages later, to the idea of being “destroyed” into the man he is today. It begins with a doctor advising Dandurand to stay a while longer, take his meds, and offers him the chance to “become the man / with those around me giving me cigarettes” (103). There’s a selfless devotion while he remains a higher status than the other patients: “I will fix / any problem or person for them and soon I’ve been there / for six months when the doctor finally says I should go ho / home now and that they’ve become concerned / that even the nurses fear me” (103). He is offered the chance at rehabilitation and devotes himself to others, though the nurses still fear him for his fighting with other patients. Dandurand balances the theme so beautifully that people are worth saving while still being flawed—it comes out in different forms, which provides the collection some rich layering. It is clear that his institutionalization is not as helpful as one would hope, and there’s a kind of resignation when Dandurand is provided with a pair of shoes—this time to leave. Dandurand imagines the “parade” the new patient “will soon be joining / with all the gods of the place walking and talking / the truth, as if the truth mattered” (103). It’s a powerful final line, precisely because of its cynicism that any person’s truth is taken seriously by those who are supposed to help.

Ironically, The Punishment offers some harsh truths about history, about identity, about wellness—hopefully truths that we take seriously. The overall project is effective, if repetitive, in working through some of the nuances attached to experiences, especially related to Indigenous trauma. It’s by no means an uplifting text, though there are moments of joy, but it is one of resilience: it is survival on display. Despite tragedy, despite loss, despite grief: we persevere.

With that in mind, happy reading!

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

I first encountered Tracy K. Smith as editor for the excellent anthology The Best American Poetry 2021. Flash forward three years or so and, by pure coincidence, I received Wade in the Water as a gift. The book is a collection of Smith’s poems, divided into four distinct sections, each with something a little different to offer.

The subject matters and themes are mostly self-contained within each of the  four sections, though of course there are some areas of overlap. The first section takes on a more pastoral and reverent quality with personal anecdotes and connections blended in. The second section is a series of found poems that deal with the racist history of the United States, while the third takes a more environmental and political focus. The final section deals with family connection, and motherhood in particular.

Some of the early poems have great quotable lines and turns of phrase. In the poem “Garden of Eden,” Smith provides a blazon of delights before announcing that “Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence of privacy” (5). The lines imbue the banality of life with a tragic quality, particularly with the phrase “desolate luxury” that hits right in the heart. The follow up poem, “The Angels,” offers rich imagery and builds towards an absence, all the more impactful for the richness that preceded it: “A rust-stained pipe / Where a house once stood, which I / Take each time I pass it for an owl. / Bright whorl so dangerous and near. // My mother sat whispering with it / At the end of her life / While all the rooms of our house / Filled up with night” (7). I adore the metonym (or is it the synecdoche?) of the pipe that intimates what is already gone, and the fact that the rooms “filled up with night” is a beautiful conclusion, since an absence (the darkness) is palpably filling up space.

In an unlikely turn of events for me, I actually found Smith’s longer works more compelling than the shorter ones, which passed by a little too quickly to make an impact. The second section of the collection capitalizes on her strength with long-form poems. It is worthwhile to quote from Smith’s “Notes” section to describe what she has done:

The text for “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” is composed entirely of letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children. While the primary documents in question have been abridged, the poem preserves the original spellings and punctuation to the extent possible throughout. [...] Once I began reading these texts, it became clear to me that the voices in question should command all of the space within my poem. I hope that they have been arranged in such a way as to highlight certain of the main factors affecting blacks during the Civil War, chiefly: the compound effects of slavery and war upon the African American family; the injustices to which black soldiers were often subject; the difficulty black soldiers and their widows faced in attempting to claim pensions after the war; and the persistence, good faith, dignity, and commitment to the ideals of democracy that ran through the many appeals to President Lincoln, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other authorities to whom petitions were routinely addressed during and after the war. (77-78)

Smith then gives a thorough list of the sources from which the poem is pulled. There are then a few pages of citations for the letters and depositions from which the poem was pulled. As Smith notes, the “original spellings and punctuation” have been preserved, spelling mistakes and all. Smith’s work as a poet becomes, essentially, a matter of arrangement, a collage. The work is cohesive in its voice and themes, despite being an amalgam of others. The poems on their own do not seem particularly “quotable” but then the narrative of the piece shines.

Similarly, the third section of the collection takes a more overtly political focus, especially with respect to the immigration discourse in the United States and the climate crisis. The longest poem in the third section is “Watershed,” which is similarly a found poem drawn from an article from January 6th, 2016 in the New York Times Magazine and excerpts of the narratives of survivors of near-death experiences. The poem has a gravitas that is difficult to ignore.

I have to appreciate writers that take on very different topics, so when the final section deals with motherhood, it’s a surprising and refreshing change. The poem “Dusk,” for example, shifts the tone of the collection. It deals with the tension between a mother and her child and the strange resentments that build. The poem begins with the question, “What woke to war in me those years / When my daughter had first grown into / A solid self-centered self?” (68). She then reflects on the minutiae that infuriate her: “I’d watch her / Sit at the table—well, not quite sit, / More like stand on one leg while / The other knee hovered just over the chair” (68). She suggests how her daughter wouldn’t lower herself in case of a fire “or a great black / Blizzard of waves let loose in the kitchen / And she’d need to make her escape” (68). Smith extrapolates this failure to sit into a larger, more existential idea that “She’d trust no one but herself, her own / New lean always jittering legs to carry her — / Where exactly? Where would a child go? To there. There alone” (68). The poem continues to explain the disconnect as personified with her resting an elbow on the table, bending her leg, not making eye contact. It leads to Smith’s existential crisis that she thought she’d have more time before her daughter grew up: “I thought / My body would have taken longer going / About the inevitable feat of repelling her” (68). It’s a great piece that highlights those small moments that are imbued with such significance for us.

Smith also does a good job of personifying concepts. For instance, the poem “New Road Station” gives life to history as a concept: “History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus” (42). It documents her journey, “Hammering the driver’s headrest with her fist” (42). The world around her seems to be actively engaged in watching her, with flies “watching with their million eyes, never bored” and crows that “cluck and caw at the woman in their frenzy” (42). The poem takes a turn at its midpoint, though, announcing that “history is not a woman // And it is not the crowd forming in a square” (42). Smith deflates the enigma of history and then says how it is not even “the rapt silence of a room / Where a film of history is right now being screened” (42). There’s a clever interplay of No and Now at the core of the poem, rejecting and asserting. There’s then the inversal where history stops being the woman on the bus and instead is the bus “that will only wait so long / Before cranking its engine to barrel down // The road” (42). Smith opens up possibilities for what history could be that are more intimate and then redirects to a child’s views, curled up in his mother’s arm “who believes history must sleep inside a tomb, // Or the belly of a bomb” (42). The poem ends on that note, and I like that the rhyme does not quite work and I like that the zeugma links the ideas with a good deal of gravity. The fact that the belly of the bomb is the last line of the poem, and the only one not presented in a couplet, gives it added weight.

In another poem, “Charity,” the concept is personified again. It characterizes her “like a squat old machine, / Off-kilter but still chugging along / The uphill stretch of sidewalk / On Harrison Street, handbag slung / Crosswise and, I’m guessing, heavy” (64). The poem presents as a kind of parable for the concept where she “bend[s] forward to tussle with gravity” (64). Her feet are off-balance, seemingly fighting against each other, and her shoulders are braced “as if lashed / By step after step after step” (64). She stares unflinchingly. There’s a great twist at the end, though, presented in italics, where the hitherto unknown speaker of the poem responds to the idea of charity. She states, “I am you, one day out of five, / Tired empty, hating what I carry / But afraid to lay it down, stingy, / Angry, doing violence to others / By the sheer freight of my gloom, / Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit / But keeping going mostly out of spite” (64). The speaker’s response to charity seems so deeply human in its contradictions. There’s the resentment of doing good, of hating what you carry but not being able to lay it down. I think the anger that emerges from the “sheer freight of [...] gloom” feels sincere and authentic, and using spite as a motivator to keep going rings true in its vulnerability.

Taken together, these poems form what I see as a good collection. The project is interesting; even when the poems individually don’t “do it” for me, the concept and craftsmanship of their assemblage is a noble project. Smith’s personality emerges with such lovely sincerity and honesty in the more personal poems and passionate insight in the political ones. It’s not likely to be the most memorable collection I’ve ever read, but it’s worth your time—it’s likely only to take an afternoon, anyhow.

Happy reading!

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa

 

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is my first experience with Mario Vargas Llosa outside of reading some of the transcript of his Nobel address years ago. I wasn’t sure what to expect and my experience definitely had some peaks and valleys of enjoyment, both towards its style and its storyline.

The essential premise of the book runs oddly parallel, in some respects, to the similarly-titled The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov. Both books involve a narrator seeking out the truth of a minor figure’s life, which is told to them second or third hand through others. Where Nabokov is focused on a literary figure, though, Llosa focuses on a young Peruvian revolutionary, Alejandro Mayta, and the lost history of his attempted uprising. In that respect, it’s similar to Ariel Dorfman’s more recent project, The Suicide Museum, where Dorfman tries to find the truth of Salvador Allende’s death. Together, these books form a trinity of engaging alternate and speculative histories.

The distinct highlight of Llosa’s project is the style his writing adopts in order to take on such a project. While initially alienating, the longer I spent with the book, the more impressed I was by the fluidity of Llosa’s prose. The loose use of verb tenses made it so that the past and present emerged simultaneously, sometimes shifting from present to past in alternating paragraphs, or sometimes even within the same paragraph. It gave the novel a kind of dreamy quality that emulated the narrator’s identification with Alejandro Mayta. His identification becomes even more direct when he interviews Mayta’s wife and the use of pronouns also becomes fast and loose, switching between “Mayta,” “he,” and “I” nearly haphazardly, placing the narrator literally in Mayta’s position. Given that the present of the novel involves the U.S. Marines arriving in Peru, the overlaying of past and present creates a poignant parallel and added dimension to the book. While simultaneity cannot quite be achieved in sequential-based text forms, the fact that the time and perspective switches within paragraphs, rather than being presented in different chapters, as many authors may do, there’s an excellent fluidity to the style that I haven’t seen in quite the same way anywhere else. It really shows how we insert ourselves into history and how history is not entirely discreet from the present.

That being said, it’s hard to adapt to the style in the initial pages of the novel. Trying to get a handle on the characters and timeline over the first fifty pages could be a challenge. Even when acclimatized, I did have some difficulties getting engaged by the story. I admit that I started the book in December of last year, and at about a third of the way through I had to pause and read roughly twenty five books before I continued it. When I did resume, though, I found myself much more engaged by the text.

Somewhere around the eighty page mark, Mayta is in bed with one of his communist comrades. Mayta asks him to let him perform sexual acts. You discover that beneath the revolutionary is a young gay man longing for affection in a context that forbids it. Actually, that conflict is an interesting layer to the text—the disconnect between revolutionaries and their lived experiences is pretty compelling. You get to see the way that all the different kinds of communists—the Trotskyites, the Maoists, the Marxists, and all the different factions conflict with one another about revolutionary strategies. It’s compelling to see Mayta’s incentive to unite the groups in a common goal and the subsequent betrayal and expulsion from the party. More than the political strategy, though, Mayta’s homosexuality is thrown back at him as a reason for his expulsion. He is seen as being weak and feminine and therefore unfit to lead the revolution, not to mention that gay people are jailed at the time (ultimately Mayta is imprisoned in the homosexual wing of the prison). It’s a compelling depiction of how the personal has such a huge impact on the political and vice versa.

In fact, the book shows how revolutions and political movements can be so contingent on minor details and contingencies. The bulk of the text focuses on the narrative of Mayta’s failed revolution. When I returned to the book after my lengthy absence, the narrator interviewed Mayta’s wife. There’s an interesting dynamic there because he was a closeted man who got married, had a child, and then became estranged from his family because his wife was not willing to deal with the anxiety of being arrested or killed. From there, we receive an account from old comrades about Mayta trying to unite the communists and staging a revolution at the prison. There’s an intensity to the morning of the revolution when Mayta and his comrades robbed banks to redistribute wealth to the people, imprisoned the guards at the prison, and liberated political prisoners. It has the pacing and intensity of a heist movie, riddled with suspense. The narrator meets with old leaders of the revolution and accessories to it; each tells a fragment of the revolution, noting a step that went wrong, and the narrator speculates on Mayta’s perspective. At one point, when the revolutionaries have been hunted down and are being fired at, Mayta supposedly realizes that they have orders to bring them in alive, and makes choices accordingly—only for two of the revolutionaries to be shot and killed. For a work of, essentially, historical and literary fiction, it’s about as action-packed as it gets.

I appreciate that Llosa reveals early on that the revolution failed, and yet still feels compelled to explore Mayta’s story. It’s a classic underdog story in that sense. It’s somewhat unclear whether Mayta was killed or imprisoned or escaped. Towards the end of the book, though, there’s the notion that Mayta was still in prison many years later. Of course, the narrator feels compelled to visit him and, like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, there are several false starts and disappointments. It’s a beautiful move that is as enticing as it is painful.

The ending has some compelling keys to the rest of the text that complicate the narrative, as well. The narrator repeats a few times that he is doing the research for the book not because he hopes to get a factual account for his novel but so that he will know when he is lying. He admits as much to Mayta, noting, “I try to explain: In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events. This investigation, these interviews, I didn’t do it all so I could relate what really happened in Jauja, but so I could lie and know what I’m lying about” (287). He tells Mayta, “Naturally, your real name never appears even once [...] Of course, I’ve changed dates, places, characters, I’ve created complications, added and taken away thousands of things. Besides, I’ve invented an apocalyptic Peru, devastated by war, terrorism, and foreign intervention. Of course, no one will recognize anything, and everyone will think it’s pure fantasy. I’ve pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends” (288). The entire interplay of truth and fiction becomes exceedingly complex. Is the novel we, Llosa’s audience, are reading the account with altered details? It seems to be. If that’s the case, so few of the details are trustworthy that it calls into question why it’s worth writing  about Mayta at all. If the book is accurate, then the ending of the book seems even more peculiar—Mayta explains what really happened and what found him in prison. If that is accurate, then it remains questionable why Mayta is worth writing a book about. He appears more as collateral damage than a mastermind revolutionary.

To return for a moment to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, I’d like to consider the ending. In Nabokov’s work, the ending is absolutely crushing: the narrator finds who he believes to be Sebastian Knight and there’s a heartfelt speech to a dying man—the wrong man, as it turns out. By comparison, Alejandro Mayta ends with the narrator finding Mayta (or does he?—how much of  this account is entirely fictitious?) and discussing the events he’s been researching for a year, the failed uprising at Jauja. There’s also a compelling reversal where the narrator explains how he intends to depict Mayta, much to Mayta’s disgust—totally inaccurate to his being. The narrator finds himself disillusioned because the Mayta he has before him cannot remember the details of what happened. There’s some lack of clarity in how much of what Mayta pretends not to remember is still in the recesses of his mind, but nonetheless it is a disheartening experience: something that seems so significant to us is inconsequential to its prime agents:

His memories are hesitant, sometimes erroneous. I have to correct him every few minutes. I’m shocked, because this whole year I’ve been obsessed with the subject, and I naively supposed the major actor in it would be too, and that his memory would still go on scratching away at what happened in those few hours a quarter century ago. Why should it be that way? All that, for Mayta, was one episode in a life in which, before and after, there were many other episodes, as important, or even more so. It’s only normal that these other events would replace or blur Jauja (295). 

Mayta offers some engaging commentary about the past, despite claiming not to remember some of the specifics. In the final pages, Llosa reinforces the key idea about the contingencies of history. Mayta comments on the failed revolution, noting that “Those things seem impossible when they fail” but continuing that “If they succeed, they seem perfect and well planned to everyone” (299). He says that the only thing separating his action from the Cuban revolution was luck and that his plan “never seemed crazy to me, much less suicidal [...] It had been well thought out. If we had destroyed the Molinos bridge and slowed down the police, we would have crossed the Cordillera. In the jungle, they never would have found us. We would have …” (299). There’s still a sense of wistfulness, tempered by the sadness of knowing that things could have been so much different — if only the contingencies had been right.

I have to admit that my review of this text is somewhat thin. The style of the text is excellent, the pace of the book is engaging (at least after the first third), the conflict is richly layered and has a human heart to it. While some of the characters are underdeveloped, the central figures of the book, Alejandro Mayta and the narrator, are finely wrought and stand out as effective figures to the literary canon. There’s always somewhat of a disconnect in time and place, which makes the milieu a little less accessible to me, but I still felt that the emotional core of the book and the optimism towards the revolution was enough to make it a worthwhile read. I liked it.

Happy reading!

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

  Braiding Sweetgrass has made quite an impact in a number of fields, most notably environmentalism, Indigenous studies, and literature. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi botanist who recounts some personal stories that parallel ecological phenomena and Indigenous teachings. Each chapter deals with a foundational concept to her study of plants and connects to either a personal story, an environmental project, or an Indigenous teaching.

There’s an anecdote early on that I find endearing, relatable, and quietly subversive. Kimmerer recounts applying to a botany program and when she is questioned about it, she tells the instructor that she wants to know, essentially, how the plants know which colours work together. It’s an aesthetic or poetic concern, rather than a scientific one—at least insofar as the instructor is concerned. Kimmerer’s gentle challenge to the discourse, though, is that these are not separate conversations, but rather different angles to the same one. She then draws on Potawatomi (and other Indigenous) stories to explain the logic that binds the natural world together.

The book’s style is appreciatory, warm—celebratory. Admittedly, I listened to the audiobook for this one and the reading of the text has such a gentle cadence, appropriate to the style of the book. It’s inviting, of course, but I found that the text lacks bite. Edge. I suppose that says more about me as a consumer that I need conflict; I need tension in order for something to be worth my while—which is very much against what Kimmerer advocates for here. Something in me is broken where I can’t appreciate the simple beauty of the world for what it is.

As such, the highlight of Braiding Sweetgrass, in my mind, is when Kimmerer talks about w*ndig*s (my understanding is that their name should not be spoken, so I’ll refrain here). Kimmerer identifies the cannibalistic creatures as symbols of unrestrained capitalism. They are relentless, unable to be satiated. Kimmerer’s storytelling on the issue is finely wrought and it becomes even more complex when considering the context of past and present Indigenous people. She suggests that the spirit of the w*ndig*s corrupts Indigenous people and makes them ravenous for flesh; capitalism does the same. Kimmerer then problematizes the fact that rather than dismantling capitalism, people strive to integrate themselves within it—it’s actually a similar line of reasoning to a section of Living in the End Times by Slavoj Zizek where the left no longer seeks to dismantle capitalism, but rather become more active participants within it, essentially selling out rather than reshaping the world. The alignment of the w*ndig* with capital is persuasive and offers an engaging story for how we’ve let things get so far.

Another section of the book deals with salamanders and the war effort in Afghanistan. I have to say, this one feels less intuitively connected, making the book come across as a little more disordered. The idea of studying salamander crossing and car-induced fatalities is interesting on its own (for instance, they have a morbid formula for deciding how many salamanders have been crushed by measuring the squish radius). The chapter jumps back and forth to a discussion of young men in Afghanistan in tanks. The connection, though, is tenuous and feels more like an insertion of politics into an otherwise innocuous project.

It was interesting to hear about the specific projects of which Kimmerer has been a part. In addition to the salamander study, she recounts excursions with students to learn in the field (she had to argue the relevance, of course, given that her work falls outside the traditional purviews of science). She recounts the cleaning of Onondaga Lake and the disastrous impacts of mercury waste. The individual projects hold weight and are worth learning about, but the broader lessons are where the book shines.

For instance, it becomes clear from the book that maintaining the environment is not enough. More is required of us. Kimmerer expounds on the idea of gift giving. She explains cultural norms for giving and receiving gifts and the idea of reciprocity. The land is a gift, it gives us gifts, and we are responsible for showing gratitude for those gifts and giving back in return. There are some engaging philosophical meditations on what it would mean for nature to show gratitude, as well. She often refers to Indigenous stories to help support the science—for instance, she discusses the Three Sisters (beans, squash, and corn) and how they are mutually beneficial to one another. Kimmerer returns to the notions of respect and reciprocity frequently, making the key lessons of the text completely clear, but also bloating the book somewhat with repetition.

Many people have recommended this book to me and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. Unfortunately, the book as a whole does not really resonate with me to leave a lasting impression. It’s a matter of taste, I suppose—I was hoping for something more explicitly revolutionary, something visceral and bombasti. Instead, Braiding Sweetgrass is a calm, inviting work of philosophy. Its warmth may warm the spirit and inspire, but I don’t think it’s going to make people take to the streets and demand change.

That being said, I hope you receive the gift of nature and grant it your own respect and reciprocity. Happy reading!

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

        Is there any point in summarizing Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon? I feel like it has so much pop-culture cache that everyone knows the story. If not, here’s the idea: Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. Disowned by his family for almost twenty years, his teacher at his special school pushes for him to be part of an experimental surgery that improves his IQ. He works at a bakery and after the surgery he comes to realize that his coworkers are pretty awful towards him, he has memories of an abusive childhood, and then he becomes a genius that outpaces the doctors that conducted the experiment. He gets frustrated being under their care and frees himself and the mouse that was the precursor to his experience. He sets up an apartment in New York and continues his studies, has a dating life, and visits members of his estranged family before losing his intelligence and returning to his former life.

The novel has a central flaw that I’ll explain with reference to theory. In History and the Novel, Irving Howe presents the thesis that the foundation on which novels stand—history—erodes as we increase our distance from it. As such, our ability to access and interpret older novels similarly fades. I would make the case that Flowers for Algernon shows its flaws in the light of the modern day. The most glaring issue is that the core of the novel relies on the idea of IQ, a much-discredited measure of intelligence. The history of science imprints itself on the book, but takes it further away from us at a foundational level, beyond the teeth-grinding repetition of the R word. The premise is compelling, but the historically problematic nature of the book breaks the immersion somewhat.

What Keyes does well, in his way, is to present the story with moral conscience and emotional core. Charlie is treated with a great deal of sympathy, with a common refrain being that he is a human being and was even before his surgery. Keyes does a lot to show the torments Charlie Gordon goes through—more on this momentarily—and to expose the evil lurking in the supposedly moral hearts of the “smart” and “normal” people in his life. Everyone treats Charlie as a child and exploits him; his mother shows him no compassion for being different and no one extends any care of him. Keyes does a wonderful job at what is arguably the novel’s climax of juxtaposing Charlie’s treatment with his own mother, who by the end of the book has clearly developed Alzheimer’s—yet people refuse to put her away into a care facility. Keyes shows the limits of peoples’ sympathy and the different treatment of people who have “proven” themselves to the rest of society.

Keyes inserts a diatribe in the middle of the novel, noting that people would never “take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence” (139). It’s a surprisingly progressive stance for the 1960s to target ableism in this way, and I can’t fault Keyes for extending sympathy, even if it is misguided by modern standards. Charlie notes that even when he had low intelligence how he knew he was inferior: “Other people had something I lacked—something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too” (139). He notes that “even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men” (139). At his best, he shows the moral core that treats people well. At his worst, he succumbs to some of the same infantilization that the people in the book subject Charlie to; he draws the parallel to children directly: “A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger” (139). He then speculates on what could happen if all people could receive the same treatment: “If I could be made into a genius, what about the more than five million mentally ******* in the United States? What about the countless millions all over the world, and those yet unborn destined to be *******? What fantastic levels might be achieved by using this technique on normal people. On geniuses?” (139). We see Charlie replicating the same standardization and borderline-eugenicist philosophy that led to his treatment in the first place, not extending sympathy to people for how they are, but instead creating a plan to make others “normal” too.

Now, I can somewhat forgive this seeming flub in Keyes’ philosophy because the novel specifically makes a distinction between intelligence and compassion. After Charlie’s intelligence takes off, he becomes patronizing, unkind, unsympathetic, and so on. People regret that Charlie’s free and easy kindness and warmth disappears as his intelligence emerges. Eventually Charlie learns that lesson, too, and says that there is no direct connection between being smart and being a good person. Consequently, some of Charlie’s views might be discounted as part of his evolution towards having a heart again.

Weirdly, though, Keyes’ narrative seems to place a lot of blame on women. A number of them are vilified or have inappropriate relationships with Charlie. His mother is the worst, alternating between insistence that he is normal and abusing him for being what she perceives as a pervert. His sister is equally malicious. The traumatic and abusive things they do to him could have been plucked from A Child Called It. Meanwhile, his teacher Miss Kinnian is largely compassionate, but I can never accept relationships between teachers and students. There’s also some strange character development in her towards the end of the book that feels inconsistent—the love story doesn’t quite earn its payoff. The other woman Charlie gets involved with, Fay, is seen as a messy free spirit artist who is regularly nude and feels like she’s paraded around as an unintellectual piece of eye-candy for the male gaze. Sidenote: it’s weird that Charlie’s low intelligence is paired with a kind of hypersexualization that he then has to recover once he becomes smart. Even women at the science conference are presented mostly as incompetent and scared of a mouse. Given how much sympathy Keyes extends to people with intellectual disabilities, it’s odd that he does not seem to offer much sympathy to the inner lives of women.

There are some wonderful elements to the book. The way it reads as a kind of Frankenstein story, even referencing Paradise Lost as a shared intertext, is a great way of exploring the premise. It deals with similar questions of responsibility towards one’s creation. Flowers for Algernon adds a spin, though, that the creation does not accept the creator’s role. To explain a little further, in Frankenstein, the creature accepts Frankenstein as his creator and wants to place demands on him. In this case, Charlie refuses to accept that the doctors ‘created’ him—he insists that he was a full person before they ever intervened, which is a great subversion of the trope.

It’s also a nice touch to see the evolving style Charlie uses to express his ideas. The book starts with a number of chapters with poor vocabulary, incorrect spelling, lack of punctuation, and so on. These emulate his inability to express himself properly and then as he learns and grows more intelligent, the style becomes sophisticated. It’s a little hackneyed but still an appropriate choice that helps to emulate the experience.

I do think, too, that the cruelty of the characters is emotional and heart wrenching. It’s most painful that Charlie doesn’t understand. His narration of his coworkers’ behaviours is clear to anyone that they are ridiculing him, but he feels like he is part of the team. It’s also hard to listen to his mother’s tirades against him and his sister’s abuses. When he goes to visit his father and his father doesn’t recognize him, it’s a sad scene and when he goes to visit his mother it’s even worse—she doesn’t recognize him at first, then does, and is so proud of his intelligence and finally accepts him—yet that hits hard. For one, we know that he is going to lose his intelligence and that these benefits are temporary. His need for acceptance is never quite fulfilled, since he has realized that he deserves acceptance and compassion regardless of contingencies. Then, because her own understanding is so fleeting, and her desperation for a normal son that she can show off so great, it’s a painful moment that brings not catharsis but shadowed saccharinity. Like his relationship with Miss Kinnian, his reconciliation with his sister feels a little unearned.

Flowers for Algernon began as a short story that was then expanded into a novel. I have to say, the book likely could have been about 50 pages shorter. There’s some extensive repetition in the middle of the book—flashbacks to a younger Charlie looking through windows (symbolism that is a little on the nose, if you ask me). I feel like a lot of the romance storylines could be cut down or omitted to focus on the central concerns of the book—not that emotional connection isn’t one of the central concerns, but it’s one that does not land as well.

As I mentioned at the start, Flowers for Algernon is a product of its time. Its didactic message is necessary, albeit marred by some historically-rooted flaws. It’s funny: I imagine that the book will have a similar parabolic structure as Charlie. Charlie begins from nothing, has a meteoric rise, and then faces an inevitable decline. Flowers for Algernon, I imagine, will follow a similar path—it began from nothing, became an icon in popular culture, but will face a swift decline as we become more knowledgeable about the science of intelligence and become more progressive in our treatment of people alienated from society.

For now, it’s a nice little book. Happy reading!

Septology by Jon Fosse

        The books I most enjoy are often the most difficult ones for which to write reviews. This review is much-delayed because Jon Fosse’s Septology is a work of extraordinary beauty. Full stop. I’ll grant you the mercy of periods because they are infrequent (or completely absent?) from Fosse’s seven short novellas, which offer pages and pages of largely uninterrupted thought, granting reprieve only in rare instances of a paragraph or dialogue break. On the one hand, I recommend this book unequivocally as a masterpiece. On the other hand, I don’t recommend it unless you have a particular set of tastes.

If you’re a fan of Samuel Beckett’s work, you’ll find a lot to love about Jon Fosse. Septology emulates a similar rhythm to works like The Unnameable or How It Is (I can’t help but notice Fosse’s narrator Asle often repeating the phrase “that’s how it is”): there are frequent repetitions, tangential observations, and meandering passages of introspection. I think Septology has perfectly captured how we I think while capitalizing on the poetic possibilities stream of consciousness affords.

This is a novel that is both easy and impossible to summarize. In terms of actual plot, the book is pretty sparse, with only one or two “events” for every hundred pages. From what I can tell, the book takes place over a week in the lead-in to Christmas. It begins with a Norwegian painter, Asle, going on a trip to Bjørgvin to get groceries. On his way home, he thinks about checking in on his friend, also named Asle. He opts not to, but when he returns home he has a sudden feeling that he needs to go back, so he makes the drive back and finds Asle shaking on the front steps of his home in the cold—presumably DTs. He then takes Asle to the clinic and Asle is admitted to the hospital. From there, Asle goes back to retrieve his friend’s dog and is waylaid in a series of bizarre encounters similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. He meets Guro, a woman who claims to know him intimately (and intimately), suggesting they’ve slept together and he stayed at her home a number of times. He delivers his paintings to the gallery in Bjørgvin as part of an annual Christmas gallery showing. Meanwhile, his neighbour Åsleik invites him to Sister’s house for Christmas dinner (as he does every year—and every year Asle declines). Asle always allows Åsleik to select a painting to gift Sister—who he finds out is also named Guro. Asle has also painted a painting that is a brown line crossing a purple line and he decides he want to quit painting (although he ultimately paints again, creating a portrait of Sister).

The beats of the frame narrative are straightforward enough, but the novel gets complicated in its reminiscences of the past and, seemingly, of possibility. Each section of Septology seems to offer a key detail of Asle’s past, often rooted in some kind of trauma. For instance, the narrator remembers his sister’s sudden death. He talks about being a child and disobeying the rules (like going down unaccompanied to the fjords) on the same day that another boy drowns; he returns home and finds his mother so troubled, given that a boy has just died. When he disobeys the rules, he accepts a ride from a man in a van who molests him and gives him a few kroner; and it’s particularly heartbreaking when he is accused of stealing and lies and lies about where he found it. Watching his experience of guilt in lying just twists the knife of having watched him just go through a traumatic sexual assault. Another section recounts him starting a rock band, feeling like he’ll never be good enough, quitting the band, and getting into a physical fight with the singer. It recounts him getting into Art School and having his first exhibition, which is simply stunning.

Before all of this, though, about thirty pages in, Fosse’s completely engrossing prose presents a scene of such incredible, heartbreaking beauty that it will forever be etched into my soul. There’s a scene in which a young man and woman are at the park in the middle of a snowstorm and Asle stumbles upon them. He watches them as they play on the swings, make snow angels, discuss leaving, defer leaving, discuss leaving, and ultimately share an intimate experience underneath the young man’s jacket. The scene goes on for roughly twenty pages and Fosse is completely masterful in balancing a tragically beautiful tone, dancing the line of reluctance and exuberance, tenderness and danger—of loss and nostalgia. I’m not sure if it was the first time in the book, but throughout the Septology Asle often discusses a kind of invisible light radiating out of darkness, or around it like a halo. This scene imprinted on my eyelids a young woman with dark hair on a swing, an outline of light surrounding her in an otherwise dark void. I can’t put into words how perfect the moment was.

Asle returns to the scene roughly fifty pages later. The passage loses some of its effect without the blips and superfluousness of Fosse’s voice, but I’ll nonetheless present an excerpted version here to reflect its rich imagistic quality:

and they take each other’s hands and walk out of the playground and up the path to the road and I stand there and look at them and he says look, there’s a car there, in the turnoff, it wasn’t there when we walked by earlier, was it, he says and she says she can’t remember if there was a car there before or not, in any case she didn’t particularly notice a car, she says and I stop and stand stock-still for a moment because I don’t want them to notice me [...]  and then I look at the two beautiful snow angels in the playground and then I go to into the playground and stop and stand there and look at the snow angels and they’re so beautiful, so beautiful in that if I tried to paint them it would turn out to be a bad painting, compared to the sight of the snow angels, I think, because that’s how it is, that’s how it almost always is, what’s beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it’s like there’s too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it, but maybe, can I maybe paint a picture of two snow angels dissolving as they melt away? could I make a picture like that shine? I think and I know at the same moment, at this very instant, right now, that another picture has lodged inside me, it will be there forever, another picture has entered into me that I’ll have to try to paint away[...] I think and I see the footprints in the snow, four of them going down, right next to one another, two bigger and two smaller, and four of them going up [...] and then mine going down after the four, and my footprints look so lonely, so alone, and so uneven, so erratic, as if I wasn’t entirely steady on my feet, as if I was drunk, or staggering a little (105)

Reading it again, I retain that feeling of longing, sorrow, and beauty all commingled in the image of the snow angels and the footprints. Like for Asle, this too is a picture that will “lodge inside me.” Especially because the rest of the scene is so sparsely described, it feels as if it takes place in a black void and then these snowy moments are captured as that bit of white that seems luminescent.

There is such a beautiful attention to shading with this book, conceptually and stylistically. The interplay of dark and light makes grey, of course, and throughout the book, Asle comments with a painterly eye on the nuances of reality (reminiscent, actually of a moment in Milkman by Anna Burns). He comments on how on a house “the siding has turned totally grey and the cracks in the wood give it so many different grey colours [...] and he says that The Boathouse is grey but it’s also so many different colours of grey that don’t have names and Sister says yes and he holds her hand tight because it’s almost enough to scare you that there are so many different kinds of grey, and so many kinds of the other colours, like the ones called blue, just blue, but there must be thousands of different blue colours, thousands, at least, no there are so many that you can’t even count them, Asle thinks. […] The sky is grey and The Boathouse is grey, the stones on the roof are grey and the walls of The Boathouse are grey, but you see how they’re such different greys?” (218). There’s a kind of terror here, but also a kind of beauty. Once again: balance.

In fact, the entire book radiates with that light shining off the darkness. Asle’s paintings take the same approach. I’ll find it tremendously difficult to quote from the book succinctly, but here is a passage that encompasses the aesthetic of the light and the darkness with my own italics added for emphasis:

I think and I look at Bragi and I see life shining in his eyes and think I understand so little while it’s like these dog eyes looking at me understand everything, but they will rot too, will pass away, or else flames will consume them, once it would have been on a bonfire and now it’s in an oven, for an hour or two or however long it takes now in an oven and then the whole visible human being, the body, is gone, but the invisible human being is still there, because that is never born and so it can never die, I think, yes, the invisible eye is still there after the visible one is gone, because what’s inside the eye, inside the person, doesn’t go away, because there’s God inside the person, it’s the kingdom of God there, yes, as stands written, and yes, yes, that’s how it is, in there, there inside the person is what will pass away and become one with what is invisible in everything, and it’s like it’s tied to the visible but it isn’t the visible, yes, it’s like the invisible inside the visible, and it’s what makes the visible exist, but out of everything that exists it’s only people in whom the invisible in the visible is so closely related to what’s invisibly visible in everything else, but different from everything that exists because it belongs to everything that exists, even though it doesn’t exist itself, not in space, not in time, it is not a thing, it’s nothing, yes a nothing, I think, and only while the person is alive does it exist in space, in time, and then it leaves time, goes out of space, and then it’s united with, yes with what I call God, and that, yes invisible thing in the visible, which acts within it, which sustains it, yes, it shows itself in time and space as shining darkness, I think, and it’s that and nothing else that my pictures have always tried to show and once my eyes get used to the darkness so that I can see a little, yes, then I can see if there’s any of the shining darkness in the picture, and if there isn’t then I’ll usually always paint a thin coat of white or black, either one coat or a few thin coats of white or black, in some place or another, a glaze, they call it, and then I keep doing it, sometimes with just white, sometimes with just black, but always with a thin coat of oil paint, I keep doing it until the picture shines darkly, I paint with white or black in the darkness and then the darkness starts to shine, yes always, yes, yes, sooner or later the darkness starts to shine, I think, but now I’m so tired that I just want to go lie down (269)

The book is finely wrought, with a meticulousness whose phrases are punctuated so beautifully (though not literally), and the construction of parallels gives the book a kind of internal coherence, though it so often slips away. For instance, in the scene I referenced above where the young lovers are observed, a parallel scene emerges later on. Asle watches these young people in the park before the snowstorm gets too bad and he needs to travel home. Much later, Asle recounts his relationship with Ales, with whom he feels instantly connected (they decide before knowing each other that they are boyfriend and girlfriend, and by the end of the day they are married, in a way). He remembers being in a park and a man dressed the same as he is in the frame narrative watching over them from a van—as though Asle is both the watcher and the watched, both the dangerous man in the van and his victim.

In fact, much of the book seems to hover around this idea of what is interior and exterior. Asle talks about how he paints that which is inside him that he needs to expunge. What is inside must come out. So, when there are multiple characters with the same name, it is tempting to see these as parallel lives—other possibilities for Asle. Indeed, he is an artist who admits he had had a drinking problem, and his friend with the same name (later referred to as The Namesake), is an artist with a drinking problem who dies from it. It’s as though the line between memory and imagination ceases to be meaningful: this other Asle could have been him in other circumstances. It’s as though Asle sees exteriorized manifestations of himself all about town. For that reason, it’s a hard book to summarize because it’s never quite clear where these characters stand—Guro and Sister, for instance, look exactly the same. Guro claims to have been intimate with Asle, who does not remember her, and she looks exactly like Sister, whose name is also Guro but whom he has never met—unless he did meet her in the cafe, which he did before Guro 1’s home burnt down with her in it and which killed her.

The complications of defining the interior and the exterior of a person come up through a doubled grammatical structure that repeats throughout the text: “I think and I think.” The repetition is a bridge between two moments—the end of one thought and the start of another. But is it not also a suggestion that there are different entities thinking within the same body? The repetition seems to serve also as a distinction. I think while I think.

That motif seems to come together in passages in discussing religion. Fosse’s exploration of Catholicism is complex, asserting that God both does and does not exist. He offers some deeply philosophical-theological meditations that discuss this difference of inside-outside and the limits of the individual. For instance, one passage reads as follows, with my emphasis added once more:

I think and I think no, now I need to stop, now I’m thinking foolishly myself, thinking about other people’s folly while my own thoughts don’t make sense, they’re never clear enough, they don’t fit together, of course you don’t need to be dipped in water to be baptized, you can also be baptized in yourself, by the spirit you have inside yourself, the other person you have and are, the other person you get when you’re born as a human being. I think, and of all them, all the different people, both the ones who lived in earlier times and the ones who are still alive, are just baptized inside themselves, not with water in a church, not by a priest, they’re baptized by the other person they’ve been given and have inside them, and maybe through their connection with other people, the connection of common understanding, of shared meaning, yes, what language also has and is, I think and I think that some people are baptized, as children or as adults, yes, some are washed clean with water, with holy water, I think, and that’s all well and good in its own terms but no more than that, and every single baptism of this or that person is a baptism of everyone, that’s what I think, a baptism for all mankind, because everyone’s connected, the living and the dead, those who haven’t been born yet, and what one person does can in a way not be separated from what another person does, I think, yes, just as Christ lived, died, and was resurrected and was one with God as a human being that’s how all people are, just by virtue of being men and women in Christ, whether they want to be or not, bound to God in and through Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not, that’s how it is, it’s true either way, I think, Christianity knows a thing or two too, and sure enough I would’ve done if it hadn’t been for Ales since I didn’t even agree with the Catholic Church about child baptism, but I never regretted converting, I think, because the Catholic faith has given me a lot, and I consider myself a Christian, yes, a little like the way I consider myself a Communist or at least a Socialist, and I pray with my rosary every single day, yes, I pray several times a day and I go to mass as often as I can, for it too, yes, mass too has its truth, the way baptism has its truth, yes (22)

It essentially becomes an inconsequential question, then, which characters and are not Asle. The echoed names suggest that perhaps all characters are versions of Asle, but because we’re all connected, there’s a posthumanist core to the book that would suggest that individual identity is spurious at best.

On the further topic of religion, each section of the book ends with Asle going to sleep and reciting his nightly prayers. It serves an incantatory function that reads as hypnotic, particularly because there are sections in other languages. They have no meaning to me, but have still seem imbued with meaning. 

I’ll never be capable of explaining this book appropriately. It is more than a novel: it is a 667 page experience—for me, it felt like a spiritual one, largely due to the balance of lightness and darkness. When Asle’s neighbour sees his painting, he comments on how it looks like a St. Andrew’s Cross. Asle is irritated by Åsleik commenting on his art, which the reader experiences with such intimate closeness that it cannot help but feel completely human and real. Incidentally, it adds to a moment of tension where Asle is immensely proud of his painting and thinks it may be one of his best and Åsleik nearly claims it for himself to give as a gift to Sister. It’s something that objectively has such low stakes but has so many profound ones psychologically. When Åsleik is asking questions about his painting, Asle is irritated by his philistinism and once more comes back to the invisible light—and I can’t help but think you either feel the light or you don’t when it comes to the style of this book:

he doesn’t want to hear anything about any invisible light, that’s exactly what Åsleik would say and that’s why I don’t want to say anything to him about it, someone lives and then he dies and that’s that, no more no less, Åsleik says and he’s probably right about that too, but then again maybe it isn’t so simple, because life isn’t something you can understand, and death isn’t either, actually to put it in other words it’s like in a weird way both life and death are things you can understand but not with thoughts, this light understands it in a way, and life, and paintings, I think, get their meaning from their connection to this light, yes, when I’m painting it’s actually about an invisible light, even if no one else can see it, and they definitely can’t, or don’t, I don’t think anyone does, I think, they think it’s about something else, it’s about if a painting is good or bad, something like that, and that’s why I can’t stand thinking about the pictures I painted to make money when I was young, they were just pictures, they didn’t have any light in them, they were just pretty and that’s why they were bad, they looked so real and the sun was shining and there was light everywhere in the picture and that’s why there was none of this light, because this light is only in the shadows, maybe, I think and suddenly I hear Åsleik say that even if he’s just a fisherman he knows a thing or two about how everything goes together, everything fits into a big unbreakable whole, people catch fish, for food, and for the fish to be caught this and that has to happen and so everything goes together in a mysterious way, everything is one big whole, but you believe in God and I don’t, he says, and I say what I always say, that no one can really say anything about God and that’s why it’s meaningless to say that someone does or doesn’t believe in God, because God just is, he doesn’t exist the way Åsleik imagines, I say and I think that Åsleik and I have talked about this so many times, it’s something that’s nice to talk about again and again, and also boring to talk about again and again (80).

From this lengthy passage, I think you can probably start to see Fosse’s project in miniature. Septology as a novel, I think, is so focused on things that we “talk about again and again,” simultaneously nice and boring. It’s the kind of obsessiveness that is both comforting and arduous. This passage about the invisible light also bridges into a discussion of religion and the way that all things are ultimately connected. The difference between painting and fishing is rendered a superficial one, the difference between God existing and not is a superficial one. Essentially, all things are connected, “everything is one big whole,” so the book explores the significance of that for the erosion of interior-exterior or differentiation between identities.

To return for a moment to a connection between painting and religion, it’s worth noting that Asle thinks the invisible light in his paintings might be something like God. The spiritual work of art is addressed more explicitly later. Asle reflects on when he quit drinking and started taking snuff and he thinks about how Ales helped him quit and how Ales died and how he was so sad that he had to keep everything of hers as it was, except for her painting supplies. There’s a beautiful passage where Asle describe Ales’ paintings; she also wanted to attend Art School when she was younger and then dropped out and became very devout. She commented on how Norwegians don’t have much of a saint-based culture and she explored that by painting icon upon icon. Asle describes how when she died, there were icons everywhere, but what becomes particularly interesting is how “she’d painted over almost all of her paintings with white and some of the best paintings I ever managed to paint were on canvases where Ales had painted over her own pictures” (257). The symbolism of the moment seems to capture this idea that there’s a spiritual layer to artwork that is present even when not visible. The saints are painted over with white and then that white is painted over and that’s what allows the artwork to shine. Even when religion is erased, it persists below the surface (if there is a difference between surface and depth).

Continuing on the idea of darkness and the light that shines through it, one of the ways in which Asle tests his paintings is by looking at them in the dark. In one passage, he returns home and thinks he should close the curtains to inspect his painting. He narrates as follows:

I think that maybe I should shut the curtains, I usually do, but not it’s so dark out that I can look at the picture in the dark just fine without closing the curtains like I usually do, maybe it’s a strange habit, always wanting to look at my paintings in the dark, yes, I can even paint in the dark, because something happens to a picture in the dark, yes, the colours disappear in a way but in another way they become clearer, the shining darkness that I’m always trying to paint is visible in the darkness, yes, the darkness it is the clearer whatever invisibly shines in a picture is, and it can shine from so many kinds of colour but it’s usually from the dark colours, yes, especially from black, I think and I think that when I went to The Art School they said you should never paint with black because it’s not a colour, they said, but black, yes, how could I ever have painted my pictures without black? No, I don’t understand it, because it’s in the darkness that God lives, yes, God is darkness, and that darkness, God’s darkness, yes, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light and I think and I think this is all just something I’ve thought up, yes, obviously, I think and I think that at the same time this light is like a fog, because a fog can shine too, yes, if it’s a good picture then there’s something like a shining darkness or a shining fog either in it, in the picture, or coming from the picture, yes, that’s what it’s like, I think, and without this light, yes, then it’s a bad picture, but actually there’s no light you can see, maybe, or is it that only I can see it, no one else can? Or maybe some other people can too? But most other people don’t see it, or even if they do sort of see it it’s without knowing it, yes, I’m completely sure about that, they see it but they don’t realize that it’s a shining darkness they’re seeing and they think that it’s something else, that’s how it is, and even though I don’t understand why it’s night, in the darkness, that God shows himself, yes well maybe it’s not so strange, not when you think about it, but there are people who see God better in the daylight, in flowers and trees, in clouds, in wind and rain, yes, in animals, in birds, in insects, in ants, in mice, in rats, in everything that exists, in everything that is, yes, there’s something of God in everything, that’s how they think, yes, they think God is the reason why anything exists at a all, and that’s true, yes, there are skies so beautiful that no painter can match them, and clouds, yes, in their endless movements, always the same and always different, and the sun and the moon and the stars, yes, but there are also corpses, decay, stenches, things that are withered and rotten and foul, and everything visible is just visible, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s beautiful or ugly, but whatever is worth anything, what shines, the shining darkness, yes, is the invisible in the visible, whether it’s in the most beautiful clouds in the sky or in what dies and rots, because the invisible is present in both what dies and what doesn’t die, the invisible is present in both what rots and what doesn’t rot, yes, the world is both good and evil, beautiful and ugly, but in everything, yes, even in the worst evil, there is also the opposite, goodness, love, yes, God is invisibly present there too, because God does not exist, He is, and God is in everything that exists, not like something that exists but as something that exists, that has being, they say, I think, even if good and evil, beauty and ugliness are in conflict, the good is always there and the evil is just trying to be there, sort of, I think and I can’t think clearly and I understand so little and these thoughts don’t go (266-267)

I apologize for the lengthy passages that I’ve been including in this review, but at the same time I feel it is necessary to see the circuitous routes that Fosse’s narration takes when exploring a concept. It’s hard to give these other words or paraphrase, particularly because the concept he’s addressing seems to be outside our capabilities of logical analysis. You can intuit the fog that surrounds this book (again, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro has the same type of fog), but how is it that one can put fog into words? Well, essentially by saying a lot that is superfluous but at the same time critical. The droplet-words look the same, but taken together form an entirely different entity. The phrase about how “they see it without knowing it” seems indicative to me of being in a firmly posthumanist framework. My understanding is that within a humanist framework, we can explain connections between ideas with a kind of logic, while posthumanism notes that there is something beyond logic that cannot be articulated. There’s a kind of epistemic framework being enacted here that relies more heavily on intuition than fact-finding, and the style intimates that intuition. 

As an aside, it’s interesting that Asle’s instructors at the Art School refused to let them paint in black since it was not a colour. Asle praises the use of grey for all of its nuances and possibilities, both terrifying and inspiring. To have black seems to be an absolute in the passage above—it’s the space where nothing is, and yet everything is in it simultaneously. It’s these paradoxical observations about the world that make this book such an engaging experience. For instance, there are two different modes of existence that Asle identifies. God does not exist but exists. It appears he’s grasping for a third metaphysical space, a paradoxical one akin to, perhaps, Jean Baudrillard (if I may be so crass as to inject theory): that which is Real is not real, that which is real is not Real.

I’m often pretty dismissive of religious literature (cough William Golding’s The Spire cough), but when it is continually touched by scepticism it seems to open up engaging possibilities. Asle addresses the common meditations for religious doubt, like “if God isn’t almighty but is more likely powerless, still he’s there in everything that is and everything that happens, because that’s how it has to be if God put limits on himself by giving human beings free will, since God is love and love is inconceivable of without free will, so he can’t be all-powerful, and the same thing is true of nature, if God created the laws that nature follows then the laws are what’s in control, I think and if God hadn’t given himself limits, for whatever reason, then he wouldn’t be all-powerful either, not in any thinkable way” (545). It’s the kind of paradox that is the starting place for many atheistic arguments and Fosse’s rambling style is exactly right for depicting paradox: if this then that, but so. The idea of self-imposed limits is an interesting one and it is somewhat Dostoyevskian as Fosse continues: “I think, because that can’t be thought, but there’s one thing I’m sure of and that’s that the greater the despair and suffering is, the closer God is, I think [...] but if you get hung up on the literal meaning, to the extent you can, then the words become meaningless, and I used to do that myself, because it’s almost like the people who spoke these words when I was growing up believed it, believed in the literal meaning of what they said, in God a father who lived up in the sky somewhere, who was all-powerful and who used that power to even exterminate millions of Jews, I think, but those who think of God like that are truly sinning, misusing God’s name, or maybe they’re not, they don’t know any better, and I shouldn’t judge them, because judge not lest ye be judged, as is written, but I can’t help it, I think it’s blasphemous to think like that (545). I think that’s a really impactful spin to consider Biblical literalism to be a blasphemous way of thinking, a degradation to the metaphorical and symbolic level.

Despite his scepticism, Asle nonetheless discusses the compulsion (yes, compulsion seems the right word) towards religion, noting, “I get very still inside, and I think that everyone has a deep longing inside them, we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God” (464). In other contexts, this would have the religious certainty that I find impossible to believably portray in an aesthetically satisfying way, but the rationale for Asle is an interesting one, suggesting that “the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing” (464). There’s a devotional passage which follows where he imagines or remembers Ales singing “Amazing Grace” (song is always more than itself—how does a melody mean something?) and then he looks at his inherited dog and reflects on the humanity of non-human animals: “I look at Bragi standing there and looking at me with his dog’s eyes and I think that dogs understand so much but they can’t say anything about it, or else they can say it with their dog’s eyes, and in that way they’re like good art, because art can’t say anything either, not really, it can only say something else while keeping silent about what it actually wants to say, that’s what art is like and faith and dogs’ silent understanding too, it’s like they’re all the same” (464). This interplay of silence, knowledge, speaking, and ignorance hovers about each of these moments connecting them. It’s also notably that there’s a perpetual displacement. That which matters most can never be addressed directly, but only circuitously in the way we think through issues.

The repetition of the book is once again critical. I am remembering Gertrude Stein’s comment that “A rose is a rose is a rose.” To me, the phrase has never been a straightforward tautology, but instead something that gains incremental force through repetition. The repetition is, in some sense, adding to the meaning and the real effect of repetition is never simply restating. To that end, Fosse’s narrator takes on another dimension:

“I think, because I always think the same thoughts over and over again and I paint the same picture over and over again, yes, it’s true, but at the same time every single picture is different, and then all the pictures go together in a kind of series, yes, every exhibition is its own series, and finally all the paintings I’ve ever painted go together and make up a single picture, I think, it’s like there’s a picture somewhere or other inside me that’s my innermost picture, that I try again and again to paint away, and the closer I get to that picture the better the picture I’ve painted is, but the innermost picture isn’t a picture sort of leads all the other pictures and pulls them in, kind of, I think, but maybe I’ve now painted everything I can paint from this innermost picture of mine? I think, maybe I’ve now in a way entered into this innermost picture and thereby destroyed it? I think, but this going into your innermost picture, yes, seeing it, well that’s probably the same thing as dying? I think, yes, maybe it’s the same thing as seeing God? And whoever sees God has died, as is written, I think and I look at the snow that’s covering the windshield and I see Asle standing there in the room and I see Mother standing there looking at him (366).

What I find compelling here is this notion that despite their differences, everything is the same in a certain way and that the sameness is all united by an unseen master project. In Asle’s case, he refers to the innermost picture that is the source of all art, but the question marks in this passage note his doubt—his doubt that all of these ideas are worth exploring, that all of them are relevant to the master project. Despite the tangents, there’s an internal coherence that all of these thoughts and vignettes in the book are revisions to a moment that form part of a greater whole. They are unique and completely un-unique at the same time. It’s notable that there are almost no, if any, periods in the book, but quotation marks are so frequent. It adds to that fog of uncertainty. 

That uncertainty shows up even in our private mantras. I’m confident that there are things we unequivocally believe, despite having no proof, but also that despite our wholehearted belief there is a doubt that underlies it. At one point, Asle is reflecting on lucky numbers, specifically because he’s deciding on the number of pictures he’ll show at his new exhibit and he notes: “usually I have thirteen big pictures and six small pictures, nineteen in all, I really believe in the number nine and I always want it to be in there one way or another, or else it can be a number where the digits add up to make nine, or something, I think, but the woman supposedly named Guro told me that the number that brings me luck, yes, my lucky number, is eight, or four times two, as she also said, because that was the number she got to by adding up the digits of my birthday, she said, but I’ve stuck with nine, and also three, I think, and so now I’m not sure about the number thirteen, because I think that thirteen can be both a good number and a bad number, the same with eight maybe, I think, no, anyway, eight is a good number, I think, but usually I’ve always had it be nineteen pictures, some of them small, because The Beyer Gallery isn’t that big and Beyer told me that he doesn’t want any more pictures than that so I’ve never had more than nineteen, but one time I brought nine pictures and Beyer said it wasn’t enough, or barely enough, it couldn’t be any fewer than that in the future, he said” (249). There’s a kind of duality even in that which we hold most dear—number eight could be lucky or its opposite and there’s no external measure for deciding its reality (possibly because there’s no difference between external and internal.)

Underlying much of the text is the notion of time. Perhaps that’s where all things lead back to—our greatest question. When Asle meets Ales, it is a significant moment—and given the repetitive nature of our lives, significant moments are hard to come by. Asle offers the following narration about time and significance:

Ales says, and she says that today is one of the great days, one of the days when something happens, yes, an event, because it’s so strange, day after day goes by and it’s like time is just passing, but then something happens, and when it happens the time passes slowly, and the time that passes slowly doesn’t disappear, it becomes, yes, a kind of event, so actually there are two kinds of time, the time that just passes and that really matters only so that daily life can move along its course and then the other time, the actual time, which is made up of events, and that time can last, can become lasting, Ales says and she says that that’s how her mother Judit talks about it, how she divides up time, she says, because she and her mother Judit talk about all kinds of things together, Ales says and Asle thinks that his Grandmother died yesterday, but he doesn’t want to tell Ales that, not now, he thinks and Ales says here she is babbling away and Asle says that he thinks he understand what she means and then Ales makes the sign of the cross sitting there and Asle has never seen anyone make the sign of the cross before and Ales says that now they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. (584)

In a surprisingly short passage, all things considered, we’re given a glimpse into a philosophy of time. There is chronological, standard time, and a kind of time that only happens when events happen. It’s a compelling idea to explore, especially in the context of a book that has so few actual events. Most of the book is showing us the fabric of time that simply passes and then an actual event happens and it lasts—the impact of the moments in the text are particularly powerful because so little of the book actually “matters” to time. What might be worth further exploration, though, is the idea that time slows when events happen, because experientially it feels to be the opposite. Fosse’s narrator lingers for lengthy passages on moments from the past and anecdotal observations and it’s hard to reconcile with the idea that time slows when you’re having fun—but that contradiction may well be philosophically significant.

In many ways, Asle’s quest in the book is to achieve nothingness. I think back, actually, to the days of working at McDonald’s. There was such a satisfying feeling to emptying a box of its final row of cups and then crushing down the box and I’ve often thought I want to write a poem about “life being as empty as a box.” Asle gives voice to a similar perspective:

I’ll just lie in bed in the bedroom without even turning the light on and I’ll keep it as dark as I can, and then I’ll try to get some sleep, and I’ll try not to think about anything, because I want to let everything be empty, yes, empty and silent, yes, silent, yes, silent and dark, because the only thing I long for is silence, yes, I want everything to stay perfectly silent, I want a silence to come down over me like snow and cover me, yes, I want a silence to come falling down over everything that exists, and also me, yes, over me, yes, let a silence snow down and cover me, make me invisible, make everything invisible, make everything go away, I think and all these thoughts will go away, all the pictures I have, all the pictures gathered up in my memory tormenting me will go away and I will be empty, just empty, I will become a silent nothing, a silent darkness, and maybe what I’m thinking about now is God’s peace, or maybe it isn’t? Maybe it has nothing to do with what people call God? I think, if it’s even possible to talk about God, if that even means anything, because isn’t God just something that is, not something you can say anything about? (500).

There’s a kind of beauty and tragedy in this passage. Of course, there’s the despairing reading of wanting to not deal with anything that constitutes life any more and just drift away. It’s an uneasy kind of peace to be empty. The snow motif resonates especially because of the earlier scene of the couple in the park, which was laced with such bittersweet tension. Here, too, snow is an uneasy kind of peace—certainly, the torment of memory is covered up, but it seems to imply that all existence stops. Life requires tension to continue.

Of course, Fosse doesn’t let things be that easy, because even the idea of nothingness is a positive entity—nothingness exists in a way often not considered. He writes that “even after all of creation is gone there will be nothing there, nothingness, that’s how it is with everything that is, with each individual person, after the individual, the person is gone from creation they will be in God’s eternity, as nothing, there is God’s shining darkness, in his nothingness, because everything comes from nothing and to nothing it will return, it comes from God, who is therefore so close, so close, since he is inside every single person,  yes, he is the foundation, the abyss, yes, the innermost picture in everyone, like a full void, like a shining darkness, I think, and this was why everything came into existence, so that God could exist” (547). The way that Fosse describes nothingness is that it has effects. The darkness, the nothingness, the void, are all extant in particular ways, possibly in the highest imaginable ways. The passage continues with a meditation on God and suggests that “whether they realize it or not [...] many of the people who don’t believe in God are people who really do, while the ones who are doing all kinds of things to show that they believe in God actually believe in something other than God [...] because they believe in good works, in repentance and fasting, in sacraments, in the liturgy, in this or that conduct bringing them closer to God” (547). You can start to see why God is “nothing” here—it’s a belief in an entity that is not its displacements. It is not good works, it is not repentance—it is a belief for nothing. Again, it returns to the idea of an erosion of the difference between inside and outside: “most of those who are inside are outside, and most of who are outside are inside” (547) and the following grammatical construction pairs two opposites as being proximate: “closer to eternity and nothingness” (547). The two are the same.

I found Septology to be thoroughly engaging for exploring these paradoxes both in a philosophical register and a deeply personal one, full of moments of heart and beauty and sorrow and tragedy. To quote Fosse one more time, I think my review of the book could be reflected here: “I think and I think and think and there’s probably nothing especially smart about what I’m thinking” (547). Fosse’s passage takes on an elegiac quality from there, noting, “I think and everything exists at some point and stops existing at some point, not just me, because obviously both my paintings and myself will cease to be, how ridiculous is it to think that anything in creation won’t disappear and turn into nothing, even the most beautiful painting, the most worthwhile painting in the world will be gone someday, the same way whoever painted it will be long gone,and the greatest poem will disappear, because everything disappears, and eventually there’ll be nothing left” (547). The rest is silence, as it were.

And while I know all of this may be true—that great art will also fade and that eventually nobody will be left to appreciate it, I have to say that Septology does feel timeless. It feels like a masterwork that will linger in my imagination, and hopefully the collective one, for years to come. And if eventually there is nothing left of it, at least we’re provided with the assurance that even when there is nothing, nothing is still something.

Happy reading; sad reading. It’s the complete experience. What a masterpiece.