She Who Remains by Rene Karabash

  She Who Remains is a book of in-betweens and dualities that begins my journey into reading this year’s shortlist for the International Booker Prize and Rene Karabash touches on something interesting and special. For a book so short, it also offers a surprising number of twists that make it an emotional, enriching experience.

For the power of She Who Remains to land, it requires some cultural context. The book’s conflict is rooted in the Kanun of Lekё Dukagjini, which is a set of informal laws and traditions passed down orally with roots in Northern Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among the practices of Kanun are blood feuds and blood taxes. One example relevant to She Who Remains is that when a woman gets married, her father makes a gift to her husband that includes, among other things, a single bullet—if, on their wedding night, the husband finds his wife to be impure, he uses that bullet to kill her. If you wrong another family, they may send a messenger to initiate a blood feud and they are allowed to kill someone from your family—a short stay of 24 hours, or a long stay of about a month, may be requested, but is rarely provided. After an indeterminate amount of time, you are then able to enact your own revenge. Absolutely critical to She Who Remains, though, is the concept of a “sworn virgin.” According to custom, pure women are able to take the oath to become a sworn virgin. After taking the oath, sworn virgins are then considered men and are afforded the privileges of men that women are not able to access. 

Rene Karabash’s novel explores these concepts structured like a structured collage of pieces. We start with a description of what a sworn virgin is and then Karabash provides a poem about a girl in her mother’s womb hearing her dad praying for a boy and the unborn girl strangling herself with her umbilical cord. The book then provides an excerpt from the Bible recounting Cain’s murder of Abel. Following that, the story ‘begins’ with a flashforward of a man being murdered: the narrator’s father. He is given a courteous greeting before he is shot and killed according to Kanun decrees. Then we flash back to Bejika, the narrator, giving her oath to become a sworn virgin and, by extension, to live as a man, Matija.

I wish there was a simple way to tell this story.

There’s not; it’s a layered, complex remix of moments. There’s a subtle frame narrative at play where Bejika is talking to a journalist (it’s later revealed that Bejika is the last living sworn virgin), but it’s subtle enough that we as audience get to be aligned with the journalist and we get brought along in the misinformation and misremembering of our unreliable narrator.

Karabash’s fragmentary style for the narration plays into some wonderful ambiguity. For instance, after Bejika undertakes the oath, the narration reads: “I exit the change and for the very first time I feel // I walk home” (19). Karabash builds up our expectation for her to express what she feels, but before we hear an actual emotion she cuts off, which makes it seem like it’s the first time she feels anything. There are also moments when it’s unclear who is speaking, aligning them in an interesting and unpredictable way—maybe implicating them together would be the better word choice here.

The plot of the book is finely wrought and elicited from me several gasps. There are phrases and scenes that repeat, and upon their repetition they recontextualize moments in surprising ways. In effect, it meant I got to have my heart broken more than once from the same moment. For example, it has been arranged that Bekija marry a man she is not interested in. She instead takes the sworn virgin oath to escape and it’s heartbreaking because it means that a blood feud will start: the man’s family will seek revenge for the betrothal betrayal. Bejika is given a black armband and she must choose who will wear it and become the target of the murder. Will she give it to her father or her brother? It’s a painful choice, especially because she chooses unexpectedly. She picks her younger brother, whom she’d spent so much time protecting.

The narrative poem at the start of the book, I assumed, was a standalone piece that accompanied the work thematically, but it also seems to parallel, literally, events in the book. Bejika seems to recall from the womb her dad talking about wanting a boy. Indeed, her mother was pregnant with twins but lost her would-be brother. Despite this sorrow for her parents, her father actually seems quite good to her and sees her as the favourite, even after her younger brother is miraculously born. He treats Bejika like a boy and allows her to do things that promote their special bond. When her brother Sále is born, though, there’s a tragic tension to their dynamic. Sále is presented as a tiny menace; we’re given a poem about him crushing walnuts with a rock, “he fills his mouth and leaves no room for another walnut / the walnuts have not yet ripened and they dye his hands black / their green skins shatter under the rock / green water sprays Sále’s legs / darkened his skin where the specks land” (35). He is initially presented as an impatient young man who refuses to wait for walnuts to ripen. There’s something vaguely ominous in the image of him crushing these so indiscriminately and darkening himself. This is also presented alongside the image of Murash (Bejika’s betrothed) popping his head over the fence, and the juxtaposition feels oddly resonant. The daughter Bejika is the golden son and Sále is never boyish enough to be their father’s boy. Bejika even tries to defend him. In one moment, she kills a rabbit and gives the credit to Sále. The boy is publicly praised publicly, briefly, before being horribly reprimanded in private. The unfairness of the family dynamically, tragic as it is, is wrought beautifully, but is all that more painful when Bejika selects her brother as the target for the blood tax her family owes.

But of course, the strength of She Who Remains is in its layering. What initially appears as a preference not to marry the man selected for her is imbued with new significance after the fact. Bejika recounts her rape prior to the wedding. She’s late in milking cows when a man enters:

“I can feel his breath on me, he’s drunk milk before he’s come here, the village whispers that at dusk he enters the goat barn and drinks milk straight from the goats’ teats, there’s other things they say about him but I don’t want to know, Kuka is now right next to me, he stands over me like a stone pillar, I’m a moth, nailed to a brick wall by the pins of his eyes, his eyes don’t glow in the dark because coals glow only when you’ve set them on fire, his eyes are black as though they’ve been gouged out, or the person behind them has been

Kuka, don’t, let go of me” (55).

I find the description powerful—not so much the metaphor of being a moth nailed to a brick wall, but more about is eyes not glowing because they’ve not been set on fire. You can also see what I mean about the dialogue. Without quotation marks, we can infer who is speaking (or maybe thinking). There’s also the critical comma after “don’t” that shows thoughtful craftsmanship over the sentence. It could easily transform into “don’t let go of me” without that comma, but I’m going to let that hang there for a moment. In recounting her rape, Bejika’s thoughts and dialogue are ambiguously presented:

“go play with the other boys on the hill, I saw them on my way here, they’re still
there, playing tipcat, I’ll go home and won’t tell anyone that you were here

I shouldn’t have said that, Kua’s strong arms encircle my waist and we plunge toward the copper milk buckets, we fall and the buckets clang like church bells, the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud, the buckets ring to the beat of the rider, ding ding ding ding then faster ding ding ding ding.” (55)

What might have started in the imagination becomes real; she acknowledges that she said the piece about going to play with the other boys aloud and that it had consequences for her. There’s a haunting “ding ding ding ding” of the buckets, which echoes through the novel, and the scene transforms into one of marriage: “the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud” (55). Evoking the wedding imbues the scene with a deeper, layered terror. You realize that not only has she been raped, but that this rape renders her ‘impure’ for her fiance, who, upon discovering that she is not a virgin, is equipped to kill her. Indeed, Bejika dreams that very scenario on the eve of her oath.

The scene is heartbreaking on multiple levels, and it becomes heartbreaking in a different way later in the book. Outside of the frame narrative, Bejika is receiving letters from her brother Sále. It’s clear from context that she has not replied to him (and only later is it revealed that she didn’t respond because she can’t read). Sále perpetually alludes to some deeper understanding, planting doubts in the reader as to the course of events.

Spoilers to follow.

The scene of the Bejika’s rape that prompted all this sorrow—her brother running away, her father’s murder, her living as a sworn virgin—in fact, is a story she has told the journalist. Sále’s letters allude to the unspoken truth of that night. At several moments, Bejika recounts a childhood friend with whom she read books but then lost contact. She and Dhana were close, so much so that whispers circulated around them—why are they reading books? Was she never taught to read? It’s revealed that those whispers were something more and that is what happened in the barn that night. Seemingly because of the suspicion, Dhana is being taken away and on the eve of her departure she meets Bejika in the barn. Bejika remembers the scene as follows:

“Dhana kisses my eyes, kisses my mouth, then she stops and buries her face in my hair, I’m leaving, I already know what this is, this is the end of the world, I still remember her salty kisses and the small hole in the wall I’d never seen before, when Dhana cried out loud, I’ll find you, the last of the daylight drained away from it, and the moment we left the dairy, eternal night would come for the both of us” (111).

Instead of being a scene of sorrow for the rape of a young girl, the story transforms with the new layer: it’s a story of a forbidden romance, an impossible love between two young girls. This recognition that it’s the end of their world, that this is their final meeting, is imbued with sorrow precisely because it is so close to joy. Throughout the scene and throughout the book, Bejika asks herself “am I dying or being born” and in this scene she asks “am I being born or am I being murdered in her arms” (111). Their love destroys them. For Bejika, this makes her impure; it is her death. Their love is the death of her father. When they part, Bejika touches “where the wet is” and it is wet with blood.

The revelation for the audience is sad, of course, but Karabash continues to layer the sadness. There’s the question of who is at fault in these circumstances. When Sále writes his letters, he alludes to the idea of forgiveness. We assume it is forgiveness for giving him the black armband, and that he is perhaps sorry for running away and leaving their dad to be killed. After Bejika narrates the real events in the dairy, Sále’s letter states that he “had the strong desire to hear the truth directly from you and for us to ask each other for forgiveness, but it seems I’m the one who has to ask for it first” (113). He says how he witnessed everything in the dairy: “You know how much I loved to follow you around, I even trailed you in secret sometimes” (113). He reveals that he peeked through a hole and watched and witnessed the whole thing. He bore witness. The two are bound together in guilt. 

That motif persists throughout the book. Later, it’s revealed that Dhana had written her a letter she couldn’t read. They reunite and the impossibility of their bond is, for a moment, overcome:

“Bekija, the woman who’s come off the bus cries out, the woman who’s headed to where my name means she who lives, she who remains alive, she who has saved herself, Bekija looks to the woman, then to the newborn calf, she cries, she smiles and she cries, the two cry and laugh together, Bekija gets up and goes to embrace the woman, the two stay holding each other for a long time, they say nothing, the calf finds its mother’s teat and begins to suckle noisily, a fly lands on its left ear, the cow keeps licking her child and it is precisely there, by this picture and in this moment that the two women feel immortality, they’ve discovered joy and in this joy there is love, and in the center of this love is the immeasurable, that, which is eternal, that, which cannot be called by name” (146).

This love transcends, but at what cost? Bejika has lived as a man for most of her life, her father was killed, her brother lost, and so on. It’s been a life of tragedy for her and in this moment, notably again centered around cows and the dairy, they “feel immortality.” Their reunion is undercut, still, by guilt. Dhana departs, leaving a letter behind. In that letter, she says, “It must be written for you and me to be eternally separated by something, and to shoulder the responsibility before God for every indirect murder we’ve committed” (137). The two feel more like star crossed lovers than Romeo and Juliet ever did, and recognizing that they’re both bound by their guilt is another tragic layer to the story, especially since the guilt originates from a system neither of them developed. Dhana comments on “that fairy-tale naivete where love exists outside of guilt and all else” (137). It’s a temporary reprieve from the eternal, “late at night and early in the morning, when the hands leave their clocks, and time is nothing but a detail, a blemish on the visage of a planet that, anytime [Dhana] gaze[s] into [Bejika’s] eyes, [she] makes [her] question whether it is even turning” (137). The letter goes on in a more sensual way recounting their reunion with a tender eroticism forever marred by their tragic pasts.

There’s yet another tragic element to the text revealed only when Bejika and Dhana reunite. Bejika develops a sudden sickness and needs to be hospitalized. It’s only then revealed that she’s lived another lie: when her mother bled out her twin, that wasn’t quite the truth. What happened was a fetus in fetu, where Bejika, as a baby, absorbed her other twin, but that twin continued to grow inside her. It’s a real thing, apparently, happening in one out of every 500, 000 sets of twins. There’s an irony here that undercuts Bejika’s own self-concept. For example, she always faulted herself for not being born a boy or strangling herself in the womb. Moreover, she converts to living as a man and lives most of her life as such, as though she was giving body to her lost twin. It also helps to account for the feeling she has that there’s someone inside her. She has always been dual and this symbolism gives voice to that.

I really loved this book. I felt it had so much to offer stylistically and emotionally. The concept is strong, the collaged and remixed structure enhances the novel’s power, and I thought it dealt with interesting themes in a complex way. It made me understand a little bit more about the world and pushed me to expand. I’m not sure what else I could ask for. So far, I think this is my frontrunner for my personal International Booker Prize readathon.

Happy reading!

The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

  Apologies to Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I read The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything immediately prior to going on vacation and now the distance is making this a challenging review to write. I would like to note, however, that when I was reading it and immediately after reading it, I found it endlessly reference-able. Jezer-Morton’s finger is so ‘on the pulse’ that I found I kept bringing it up in conversation to help explain so many of our everyday experiences.

Jezer-Morton’s approach is simultaneously academic and anecdotal. For instance, she may go from referencing Baudrillard to a famous influencer in the same breath. I appreciated that balance of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ throughout the text; it enriched the work and elevated our the discourse around phenomena as common as posting vacation pictures.

The book covers the phenomena we post, like vacations, birthdays, baby announcements, personal struggles and grief, and so on. While I don’t recall her mentioning Paul Ricoeur specifically, his notion that we understand ourselves through ‘life stories’ seems pertinent here. We edit our stories in a way that helps to shape our conceptions of ourselves. For instance, when we go on vacation, we post pictures of what we understand to be the purpose of travel and bring ourselves into the narrative of a life-changing trip, even if it disappoints us. In fact, everything we post, the author suggests, is part of our ‘brand.’ Each of us is a brand that we maintain by curating and posting details strategically, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it. The fact is, we follow conventions we’re not aware of, and it’s strange to see ourselves beholden to those social media patterns.

The chapters about ‘celebrations’ and ‘reproduction’ were interesting. In particular, I  learned that the whole notion of a ‘gender reveal’ party was born on social media as a way to engage with audiences. Jezer-Morton problematizes gender reveals (a misnomer in their own right, by the way…) and points to the harms that have occurred as a result—like people starting forest fires with their colourful fireworks. More interesting to me is that the first people to do it and post it on social media regret the direction it took. I’m interested in the long-term consequences of something that seemed innocuous to begin with.

Some chapters strike an interesting balance; Jezer-Morton is not of the mind that social media needs to be abolished, and it’s compelling to see how it produces access for some subsets of the population. In one chapter, Jezer-Morton talks about a restaurant in LA, I think The Sugar Factory if I remember correctly, and its strange place in culture. She describes the restaurant as not being particularly good but it gains notoriety because it caters so specifically to social media; all the food is ‘showy’ (even though it often goes uneaten, according to one of the employees). Servers bring out drinks with special effects and they do elaborate dances for the patrons. It’s a mid-level restaurant, a little pricey, but less expensive than, say, taking kids on vacation. The argument goes that taking photos there is a way of advertising wealth and glamour when one can’t fully engage in elaborate vacations. It’s a way of getting access to a wealthy conception of self when reality doesn’t align, exactly. Jezer-Morton describes going to the restaurant twice; the first night doesn’t have any instantiations of servers dancing, so her contact tells her to come back again the following night. One of the meals The Sugar Factor offers is a hamburger covered in 24K gold leaf (if that isn’t symbolic, I don’t know what is). The chapter ends on the server’s powerful line, told to her in secret, that tomorrow the family will “shit gold.”

The text documents a number of influencers’ perspectives and experiences, and one thing that comes up is that it is still gauche, verboten even, to display poverty online. One influencer describes really challenging experiences with two former partners who are both addicts, one of whom the woman sent to jail. She documents the abuses she was subjected to and puts it online to help process the grief and create connection. Among everything, though, she notes that you can never post about financial challenges. Audiences are not prepared for that. Of course, that extends into the posts of people who are using social media for business. Being honest about a failed MLM, for example, spells disaster for anyone trying to cling to the illusion.

The Story of Your Life also explores the haunting effect of monetizing our lives for others’ entertainment. For instance, a number of influencers make their living by posting their family content. From pregnancy announcements forward, couples will often share their experiences as parents and post their kids. The reality is, though, that after a certain age: audiences don’t care. Parents either need to have more children or pivot. It’s such a dark undercurrent to the family friendly content knowing that there’s an expiration date on the cute children that parents are profiting from. Let’s not even get started on trad wives.

One chapter that is particularly odd to me is the one on grief. Recognizing that we still must not show grief about lacking money, other forms of grief are acceptable and encouraged. Communities form around grief. I just have such a hard time seeing it as sincere rather than performative. If someone is upset and crying about traumatic loss, for example, I can’t help but picture that they recorded it in the moment, then took time to edit, then took time to post. To me, there’s so much distance from the actual grief and that performance of immediacy takes me out of it entirely. Jezer-Morton again points towards a balance; some people find genuine connection and community around grief.

These pockets of the internet are interesting to consider on their own, but I think the strength of Jezer-Morton’s book is in articulating how social media shapes the way we live. In some ways it’s like that classic debate of whether art imitates life or vice versa (do we count social media as art?). We have been conditioned to now see our lives through the lens of social media. We decide what is worth doing based on what is worth posting—what food we eat, what sights we see on vacation, how we choose to celebrate.

We also shape our lives around narratives that build; we act as if we’re building towards some kind of climax, as if our life is made of big moments. Towards the end of the text, Jezer-Morton makes a gesture towards ‘flat narratives,’ stories that are not decided by big moments. She thinks back to growing up on a commune where life was flat and where people shared notes in a guest book like an early form of social media. She imagines a world in which we share our quiet moments rather than emphasizing the big ones, a life where not much happens, but that we value those tiny moments. I’m not sure if the structure of social media will allow quiet living like that—it feels like the medium is geared towards subsuming everything into a grand narrative—but it does seem like a worthwhile aspiration. 

Happy reading!

The Witch by Marie NDiaye

What an odd book this is. Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize and despite its novella length (~130 pages), when I tried to summarize the plot to my partner it took me a solid 20 minutes. The Witch is partially a character study and partially a family drama focused on Lucie, a woman whose bloodline has the capacity for magic but whose talents are far inferior to those of her mother, her grandmother, and even her two daughters.

At the outset of the novel, we’re introduced to Lucie’s powers of divination—her ability to see into the past and into the future in a limited way, her visions accompanied by bloody tears. The novel begins with the completion of Lucie’s daughters’ training. Lucie has been training them in the basement and they’ve finally cried blood, a sure sign of their capabilities. I found the daughters to be particularly compelling figures. They’re oddly practical and detached, yet mischievous. At first, they don’t seem to make much use of their abilities, using their predictive powers merely to note that it’s raining tomorrow so they won’t be able to play basketball. As the novel progresses, they take on a more ominous quality—they transform into and out of being ravens and fly around, inspiring in their mother a certain pride but also fear of their inevitable departure, which they enact—transforming into ravens and flying away forever—when their Lucie tries to hold their hands in tandem).

In fact, a lot of the book revolves around generational disconnects and the tension between independence and collectivity. Witching serves as a kind of metaphor in that regard, being something that is passed down through generations of women. Lucie recognizes her own powers are relatively poor despite her mother’s powers being strong. Lucie’s mother tries to deny her powers, though, largely for the sake of her husband—Lucie does the same. NDiaye implies that it’s necessary for witches to be initiated into their skills before they turn thirteen, so there’s a kind of communion that must take place, but once the children are equipped with their skills, they have an alarming level of control over themselves and, potentially, others.

Indeed, the book feels disturbing precisely because of how disconnected everyone seems from one another. For example, Lucie has a neighbour, Isabelle, with a young son who is always on edge. Isabelle expresses a great deal of disdain for him and spends her time trying to get him into a private school in Paris so that she doesn’t have to deal with him. She alludes to leaving, pointing to the sky, and Lucie later sees Isabelle’s son on a school trip. Isabelle, meanwhile, has abandoned her son and husband, neither of whom seem happy—and indeed, Lucie sees the son in the future as a morose man. The book starts with a scene, too, where Lucie’s husband Pierrot brings home a guest from his timeshare-selling club (Pierrot’s job is to scam people into timeshares). It’s revealed that the man has abandoned his wife and child and that Pierrot has a strange reverence for him because he intends to, and does, do the same. Lucie’s mother is disconnected from her grandmother; Pierrot’s mother ultimately disowns her own daughter by the end of the novel, and that daughter ends a pregnancy. When Pierrot gets a new family, he keeps a smiling face while conversing with Lucie and simultaneously kicking his new partner’s children. Late in the book Lucie starts teaching and grows to resent her students, another form of generational disdain. There’s a motif throughout the book of people abandoning their families and hating children. It also seems to be that everyone remembers one another differently. Lucie continually expresses shock at how different people seem from when she last saw them and vice versa. There’s a feeling of disorientation that permeates the text.

One of the most marked disorientations is probably Pierrot’s sister. Lucie and her daughters Maud and Lise visit Pierrot’s mom and sister, the latter of which has become much more rotund and is heavily made up. It’s implied that she’s maybe selling sex, but it’s not confirmed—though she is pregnant. Maud and Lise want to have a fun night on the town with Lili and take her out. It’s implied they turn into ravens again. When they return the next morning they announce cheerily that there’s no more baby. It’s an ominous, compelling moment. It’s only in the closing pages of the book that we return to Lili. By the end, her mother has given up on her, thinking her daughter has gone insane. She keeps rambling about birds coming back to take her away or becoming a bird or some other kind of nonsense. She, too, is left with no one.

The book, for all its brevity, has a number of plot threads that are hard to summarize. If we follow the main character, the main points are that Pierrot has left her and the children behind. Lucie does not want him back, but discovers that he has taken 120, 000 francs that her father had given her. She tries to get the money back and discovers her husband’s whereabouts through divination; when she tracks him down he discovers he has a new partner, very religious, and three children. This, despite the fact that he wanted to eschew all conventions. He hated his wife, he hated his kids, he hated living in the suburbs, he hated his job, he hated conventions and patterns and he wanted out. When Lucie is unable to reclaim the money he stole (how does she think they’re living, the new woman wonders), she leaves. Meanwhile, she has a plan to ‘parent trap’ her parents. She can’t fathom how they were able to have a happy thirty years together and then part ways, now being separated for five years and with her mom having a new partner. So, she’s trying to convince her mom and dad to meet together for a cottage getaway she has arranged. Her mom insists it’s a terrible idea and warns of something very bad happening. Her dad says he’ll do it but he needs the 120, 000 francs back: turns out he was embezzling it from clients at his insurance agency and he’s sure he’ll get demoted but that he may be able to avoid arrest if he gives it back. Lucie does not tell him she doesn’t have it. The central threads are pretty compelling.

I’m left to wonder, though, about the idea of conventions and why the last act of the book gets so strange. NDiaye continually refers to the words on characters’ clothes, as if they are branded with slogans as placeholders for genuine experience. Pierrot rages against conventional bourgeois life. Maud and Lise are obsessed with TV, which Lucie aligns with premonition—she thinks perhaps her children are unimpressed with their divination powers because, thanks to television, nothing is surprising anymore. Lucie also reflects on the predictable secrets and disclosures of soap operas. We come into stories with expectations of how they can go.

The Witch does not follow such conventions.

In the last act, Lucie (re)encounters her neighbour Isabelle. It seems trite to ask who the real witch is, but Isabelle is certainly a contender. The dialogue between them feels ominous in its manipulation. Having been abandoned by her husband and her children, with her parents unlikely to reunite, Isabelle asks who still cares about Lucie and she would be hard pressed for an answer. She asks this under the guise of offering her a job at a new school she has started, funded by taxpayers: a school for Women’s Spiritual Health. To the reader, it feels like a deal with the devil, but Lucie accepts a position teaching divination to young women (Objective Knowledge of Past and Future for Self and Others). This, among other classes where teachers are continually depleted to their vampiric students, absorbing their energy. It’s another critique of bourgeois society where rich people take frivolous courses like Introduction to Therapeutic Colours, Advanced Knowledge of the Self, Progressive Discovery of the Unknown Muscle, and so on. Using her divination powers sap Lucie’s strength, and her students are perfectly content to have their pasts and futures told, so instead of actually teaching she just gives them the information they want (is this modern education with ChatGPT…?). In any case, she just gives fake information that is plausible enough.

There’s a really interesting moment in which Lucie reflects on her talents. She is teaching at a school where she sees everyone as frauds, “woo woo New Age” types. Being in that context, she doubts her own gifts: “I began to doubt that I’d ever possessed any gift other than fabrication, that the kind of power the women of my maternal family thought they enjoyed even existed” (116). She thinks about her gifts as mere superstition, and that the only thing it accomplished is that the women in her bloodline convinced themselves. She reflects that they convinced themselves so utterly “that we believed in what we thought we were seeing—of the truth of stories handed down by unhappy women, poor, downtrodden, naively cunning old women like my credulous ancestress, so passionate about divination, my mother’s mother” (116). She considers that her children did not turn into birds but instead hitchhiked or were arrested. She sees herself as “nothing more than a pathetic woman of a perfectly ordinary kind, abandoned, a fraud, like my fellow teachers, their faces worn down by drab torment, by mediocre calamity” (116). If we return to the idea of an individual against a collective, we see that she tries to pride herself on her unique talents but loses that sense of self by being among a community of people she cannot respect. She is absorbed into the same fraudulent existence as her counterparts, a parallel to her husband’s experience as a bourgeois salesman.

Here’s where the ending really takes an ironic turn that subverts our bourgeois expectations. The police show up and Isabelle placates them with respect to her educational institution, but sics them on Lucie. The students have accused her of—get this—not witchcraft. They accuse her of making things up and she is charged for being a charlatan and a fraud and taken to prison. It’s a great, darkly comic twist that where women have continually been tried for being witches, here we are with a witch being tried for not being a witch. All the same, the police won’t touch her, fearing that she is a witch, while charging her for not being one. The scene escalates, but I won’t spoil that part.

I will, however, spoil the culmination of her parents’ reunion. Skip this paragraph if you want to retain a sense of surprise. A common thread in International Booker Prize shortlisters this year is the idea of guilt and complicity. When Lucie tries to reunite her parents, her mom ultimately explains why their reunion is impossible and the explanation is fraught with emotional complexity. She explains as follows:

“She and my father had been married for twenty-five years without I-knew-what (her power, her gift) ever coming between them, both because my father was deeply skeptical and because she herself made very sure not to show any sign of it. She only worked marvels in secret. She did work them, yes, she couldn’t help herself, because she was enormously talented. But one evening, without in any way meaning to, my father caught her. Coming home earlier than usual, he spotted the tip of a serpent’s tail. She never doubted that she could easily make him forget that, so deep was his disbelief, and in any case he didn’t say anything, he didn’t shout, didn’t protest. He didn’t react at all. In truth, she had nothing to reproach him for. It was her, my mother, who, knowing that he’d seen what he wasn’t supposed to, felt her affection mutate as the days went by into a frenzied longing to destroy him. He had to be punished for letting himself see what he should have closed his eyes to, even if it wasn’t his fault. She would have done him some irreparable harm. She felt a need taking root in her, the need to punish him, crush him, destroy him, and there was no hope of quelling it. She didn’t hate him, no, but the enigmatic, powerful part of her that revealed itself only in solitude and darkness, that cold, imperious, violent part of her was at war with her usual goodwill toward my father. She would soon have used her genius to demolish him in some vile way. Realizing that, she left, she fled.” (87)

Like other International Booker Prize nominees, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, and The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, there’s this question of what makes someone guilty. There’s an ambiguity of who is at fault: the perpetrator or the witness, and the way in which the dynamic between them forever changes on the moment of recognition. There’s a complex ethics here that recalls Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. The fact that she can’t forgive him for having seen her, for being recognized, is such a challenging and complex feeling to explore.

(Spoilers continue here). The way the storyline of the parents’ reunion plays out is such an odd and haunting one. Lucie’s mom’s new boyfriend comes to her to deliver a message. Her mom feigns being busy so as not to be seen. The message comes with a gift: a small can with a snail in it eating grass. That snail is her father. They went through with their reunion, but as promised Lucie’s mom has done something bad in transforming her ex into a snail, presumably forevermore. Lucie, meanwhile, hears from his insurance company that they are indeed pressing charges and he’ll be under arrest if he comes back. Then, when Lucie is arrested, she has her possessions taken away. When she’s released, her possessions are gone; she assumes her snaildad was tossed away and crushed under foot. A dark end for someone who tried so hard not to recognize magic. 

The ending of the novel is imbued with irony and sadness. Everyone feels disconnected. Everyone feels isolated. Even Pierrot, now expanding his new family with a new child, does not seem too thrilled about his new life, reverting to his dark visage once more.

NDiaye’s style is replete with complex sentences. Some of the clauses take readers on a full journey before revealing the central point. At the same time, the style feels direct and accessible. There’s a simplicity to the language, but a complexity to the expression. The sentences read like the magic visions of its central character: in some ways they are illuminating and vivid, in other ways sparse and oblique.

Despite the digital ink I’ve spilled on this review, The Witch perplexes me. I still don’t know how to feel about its strange tone and its unsettling dynamics. The characters feel cruel, cold, and distant, but I still feel for them—even and especially when they literally cease being human. The Witch is an uncomfortable read, and it’s difficult to navigate how our individualism puts us at odds across generations and how we abandon one another through our own pursuits. I’m sure there is much more to discuss here, but my augury is limited and I won’t be able to speak to all of the author’s intentions.

With that said, happy reading!

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia

If you know me well, you’ll know that I’m staunchly anti-AI and see it as a politically suspect plagiarism machine that erodes our capacity for deep thinking, creativity, community, and empathy. Despite its title, Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI is a series of journalistic essays that present, generally, a more optimistic view of AI’s capabilities. I’m still not persuaded, but Murgia offers a balanced assessment that helps to combat apocalyptic thinking. The book offers cautious optimism for those receptive to technology. 

Essentially, each chapter focuses on an aspect of AI development or implementation. The book begins with a discussion of who trains algorithms and how it works. Murgia provides a case study of a woman whose whole family was working on algorithm training essentially by completing captchas. The central issues in the chapter are presented as a compelling narrative, even if it’s well-trod ground, namely the ethics of exposing people to horrific content at a rapid rate for minimal pay with no PTSD resources (for fiction, cf. We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets). Where Murgia adds her own twist is in discussing how the algorithm training models exclude even the employees training them; in the case study, the woman has multiple warnings filed against her by the system and was suspended from work, cut off from her income. The agency of the human-algorithm dynamic becomes inverted with a startling lack of transparency. That thread is picked up in a later chapter with respect to UberEats. One of UberEats’ employees documented problems with the system, unfair and obscure payment, and started tracking his own time. He also created an app called UberCheats for other employees to document how their wages were being stolen, to share knowledge, and so on. It was a really interesting way of fighting back at a company that hides behind algorithms so that nobody is responsible.

        The other compelling element of the first chapter is how we are all training AI. Every time we identify a stop sign, the parts of a bicycle, and so on—all of those millions of captchas are being used to train algorithms. With Murgia’s optimistic spin, she highlights how people can be trained on how to train AI for issues of significance, like identifying diseased skin or anomalous blood samples for medical purposes.

It’s hard to see the light in the second chapter, which elucidates the extent to which AI is used to generate deep fake pornography. Again, Murgia anchors the chapter in a case study of a poet whose likeness was stolen and placed her in all kinds of graphic scenes. The statistics on how much (and how quickly) AI technology has been deployed for revenge porn, deep fake porn, and so on, is truly disturbing; I don’t know if there’s a way to spin that positively. Murgia’s case study for the chapter describes the disorientation of seeing herself in situations that she was almost certainly never in—the most alarming part, perhaps, is the doubt the experience inspired in her, not so much about the situations she was depicted in, but who in her life might have generated these videos. She started eyeing her male friends with suspicion, then her female ones, wondering who was at the heart of stealing her pictures and generating these images and videos. It’s pretty harrowing to hear how ill-equipped the legal system is to create and enforce protections around this kind of stalking and sexual abuse.

On the topic of crime, Murgia has chapters that discuss the predictive power of artificial intelligence. One chapter goes into the ways in which facial recognition algorithms are tracking everyone through the streets and artists and activists’ attempts to resist. In another, Murgia explains how algorithms have replaced humans as the driver of policy and the unforeseen consequences for the most vulnerable. For example, there’s a lengthy discussion of an algorithm that classified 600 of the nation’s youth as being most dangerous and likely to offend or reoffend, and then another list of 400 as a secondary sorting. The Minority Report-esque nature of the AI system classified youth who had offended, but lumped in youth who were the victims of crime, whose families accessed social services, and so on. In an attempt to make statistical predictions regarding crime, the algorithm was creating policy that reinforced extant biases. See also Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble and Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks for more information on these problematic practices.

In these situations—really, in all situations outlined in the book—algorithms are improved only through intensive human intervention. By way of example, Murgia has a chapter about healthcare. When people defend AI, they often say how AI will revolutionize healthcare, find cures for cancer, and so on. (Conversely, nobody considers how AI will revolutionize the creation of diseases, but that’s another story…) Murgia’s case study shows how improperly trained algorithms were misdiagnosing patients and it was only with increased face-to-face time with doctors, doctors who understood context, that care actually improved. In Argentina, there was also a project to predict which young girls would get pregnant as teenagers. Among the factors considered for prediction were things like community, religion, income, and so on—but notably ignored all trace of men, as if young girls were self-impregnating. The algorithm also did not account for the practice of gang rape that had become endemic to many communities in the region. The young girls’ data was then maintained in a database that could potentially be accessed by subsequent governments, which is particularly concerning given the precarious legal status of abortion in the area. It’s only when humans started challenging the algorithms that they could be refined—or, more appropriately sometimes, scrapped.

In one of the final chapters, Murgia considers the way ChatGPT in particular has been developed and the (mis)uses to which it has been put. One of my core concerns is that ChatGPT doesn’t produce anything meaningful and I felt validated by the perspective of a science fiction writer who is interviewed in the chapter. ChatGPT is incapable of producing anything that is truly moving and I’m sick of pretending like it could. There’s an anecdote about Murgia’s daughter making puns, trying out language games. The author comments how “ChatGPT doesn’t find anything funny.” In one sentence, that is the core of it. There’s no personality, no life in it. The author continues on to decry the notion that training ChatGPT is like training a child; it’s a completely different process that requires human connection. 

I’m unclear, exactly, on how Murgia maintains a sense of optimism with respect to artificial intelligence systems. Every chapter documents problems and shows the cracks in AI systems. The only way to combat faulty systems is to promote increased human intervention by social scientists, artists, historians, and so on—but I’m not optimistic that we’re headed in that direction. I worry that we’re going to end up in a world where AI programs what is statistically most likely, and then reinforces those same statistical probabilities as a matter of policy. It would be great to implement some of the critical questions Murgia shares, but I’d be hard pressed to find examples of business operating benevolently to improve the world.

Good luck out there, fellow luddites! Happy reading!

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

        I think what I dislike about Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director is precisely what makes it work. At its core is a set of moral questions about oppressive rule, complicity, guilt, and the ethical status of art. Within the framework of historical fiction, Kehlmann explores the life and work of G. W. Pabst, real-world Austrian director of The Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and, under Nazi rule, The Comedians, Paracelsus, and The Molander Case—a film that was never released, lost when the Soviets came to liberate Prague, and a large focus of Kehlmann’s novel, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

There’s something enchanting about stories around lost media and the possibility of what might have been. At the outset of the book, World War II hasn’t started yet but the antisemitic context is well underway. Pabst has an idea for a film in which a group of people from different walks of life are on a boat when war is announced. The ship descends into madness; the passengers hurt one another, torture one another, and at the climax of the film it is revealed that the announcement of war was false, an illusion. Slowly, a man starts to play an old song on the piano and the group returns to normal, as if the previous hours had never happened. It’s a compelling premise that Pabst pitches unsuccessfully several times and seems to reflect his concern with a society that ignores its collective trauma with the illusion of art. By the end of the book,  Pabst couldn’t possibly conceive of the idea.

Essentially, Kehlmann’s novel shows us that story through a glass, darkly. One of Kehlmann’s strengths is switching the focal point strategically to give us perspective for the plot’s effect on his characters. There’s a certain filmic sensibility switching between characters, predominantly showing us Pabst, but also switching to his infant son’s point of view as we return to Austria, Pabst’s wife Trude at her book club, his dementia-ridden mother in her sanatorium, and flash forwards where we hear directly from Pabst’s assistant Franz Wilzek. There’s one passage about Jakob, the son, enjoying art class. Kehlmann describes how Jakob breaks down the whole into pieces: “The trick is to look at a thing as if it weren’t a thing and as if you didn’t know what it was” (119). He then describes the art process as “a collection of surfaces” where “white and black” are at play. This cubist abstraction has a depersonalizing effect, and indeed Jakob becomes a Nazi presumably by the same process. Leaping between these characters has a disorienting effect, particularly at the start of the novel, but aids in creating the ‘fog of war’ effect to obscure the implications of Kehlmann’s story beats. At the same time, it gives us a hint to their full characters rather than as just “white and black” playing on surfaces.

For some additional context, I’ve been reading the shortlisted books for the International Booker Prize 2026. Of the three I’ve read so far, The Director is a more conventional novel, driven by its story and cast of characters. While less experimental in its form, it still creates a reasonably compelling narrative, even if there’s a pervasive unsettling ambiguity.

Essentially, the book explores the viability and human cost of art produced under a fascist, totalitarian regime and the ways in which people are rendered complicit. Kehlmann reminds us several times throughout that filmmaking requires a team—lighting, camerawork, actors, extras, a director, production, distribution, and so on. At least two or three times, Pabst talks about the ‘rules’ of editing, which he prides himself in. One motion must always follow another. If we see a car drive off left, the next shot needs to start with a motion from right to left. There’s a sense of coherence in his perspective of editing, but more sinisterly a sense of inevitability. The idea that one motion must follow another is strangely close to the idea of people just following orders, of getting swept up in small concessions to Nazism and by necessity escalating to unimaginable atrocities. Perhaps it’s for these reasons that I had a Freudian slip more than once where I called The Director, mistakenly, The Dictator. At the end of the book, Pabst and his wife are examining a cave painting that depicts violent acts seemingly under the direction of a being whose head is comprised of red speckles and a set of eyes. Following Pabst’s rule for editing that the juxtaposition of images necessarily creates a resonance, the couple then discusses their old Nazi groundskeeper and suggest that it wasn’t Hitler or Goebbels who ruled, but men like their groundskeeper. It seems to me another statement on the ‘banality of evil’ as popularized by Hannah Arendt.

But it gets more complex. More ambiguous.

At the beginning of the novel, Pabst is living in Hollywood but is having trouble getting work as a director, relegated to terrible titles. He is called back to Austria to care for his ailing mother (although this ‘excuse’ is called into question by several others—why did he bring his whole family, including his son, for example?) and then remains because he’s injured on the eve of their departure at the hands of their groundskeeper Jerzabek (but was he? His wife denies that Jerzabek pulled the ladder from under him and that he was injured at his own hands). His motivations are unclear, but then Pabst is ‘coerced’ into the Propaganda Minister’s office under the premise that he can have great film projects that are ‘art’ and ‘not political.’ The scene is compelling, funny, and disturbing because the conversion is rooted in what cannot be said openly. Pabst is turning down the opportunity (indeed, he had previous run off and threatened to hit a Nazi that approached him in Hollywood about making films), but he’s not allowed to say no. The Minister gives Pabst the words to use to maintain decorum and avoid the threat underlying the conversation: this Communist, left-wing director is being offered the opportunity to work at making films for Germany or be sent to a concentration camp. The Minister has asked him there, but insists that Pabst asked for the meeting. Pabst tries to say his health reasons are preventing him from making films; the Minister says that Pabst is there to apologize for making Communist propaganda, being sympathetic to Jews, and so on. The Minister says he’s “unforgivable,” but here he is being forgiven all while being coerced into saying he’s sorry. A collective illusion.

As a brief aside, there’s a great scene that takes place in the sanatorium after Pabst’s mother has been placed there. She is genuinely suffering from dimentia, often mistaking her son for her husband and her grandson for her son. She starts saying some things that could be construed as being against the party and it’s revealed at the end of the chapter that many of the elderly there are able to get away with things because they’re seen as infirm. One of her fellow patients tells her privately, “We’re safe here, our confusion is tolerated, but you musn’t take that for granted” (172). Essentially, the elderly are able to escape the collective illusion: “I had to do a great deal to be allowed here. Outside they would have come for me long ago. But no one is looking here. After all, we’re very old. Our brains are fragile. Thankfully, we are the most uninteresting people” (172). The chapter ends with their delusions running together: for the man, intentionally, for Erika Pabst, genuine—it’s an open question as to which is better.

The most challenging part of the text is when Pabst is working on his final, lost film The Molander Case. Midway through the book, we see Trude at her book club, where they always read bland, sensationalized novels by the same Nazi author every time. Eventually, Pabst is enlisted to make the film adaptation of the novel. One of the things that perplexes me is how and whether he resists Nazi rule via the film. For example, he casts the same actor as the ‘good’ prosecutor and the ‘bad’ prosecutor—giving direction to act, essentially, like a Nazi official in one of the roles. It seems to be implied that Pabst recuts and edits the film to disrupt the original story and part of me thinks that casting the actor in a villainous Nazi-coded role would allow him to engage in commentary. When the author of the original work storms in, demanding to see the film (before it’s even cut), he sees one minute before getting into a rage and saying that he’ll have the director sent to the camps. Given that he’s a staunch Nazi, it feels like a moment where Pabst is onto something subversive—he even comments something to that effect; the more the author hates it, Pabst says, the more likely it is that they’re onto something really special. In one part of the film, Pabst uses presumably Jewish extras in a crowd scene in which people are watching a virtuoso violinist play, somewhat reminiscent of the film Pabst had earlier proposed. Pabst has some of the extras do horrific rictuses. For instance, one of them is instructed to bite her lips harder and harder until she bleeds. He says he’s going to intersperse the images for a second into the crowd shots. When his assistant says nobody will see it, Pabst says that’s part of the point—there’s just enough to make them doubt, to make them think about what they saw. It feels like he’s up to something subversive, like he’s trying to prove Walter Benjamin’s observation that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The artistry of the violin is undercut by the horror we barely see.

So, there are lots of seeming virtues for the film. Pabst even defends the film, telling his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist” (270). Years ago, I remember seeing an interview with Chris Hannah that bad political contexts are good for art—it’s not worth the cost. Here, Pabst is committed to making his masterpiece in spite of, or perhaps within the context of, totalitarianism—but he does seem to be trying to do something good.

But.

But.

At the opening of the book, we are witness to a talk show where a confused man is interviewed about being Pabst’s assistant. The talk show host starts asking about The Molander Case and the assistant, whom we know a little better by the end of the book, starts protesting that the film was never shot. He’s under the pressure of the surveillance:

“I look at the screen. See myself looking off somewhere—of course, the monitor isn’t the camera, you have to look into the camera to see yourself looking out from the monitor, except then you obviously can’t see yourself because you’re looking into the camera, not at the monitor. And now the monitor, even though it’s showing me, is showing something else at the same time, and to avoid seeing it, I close my eyes, but that doesn’t help, and I still see them: black-and-white people in a concert all. From high above I’m looking down on them, as if I were flying, a crystal chandelier is shining brightly, I’m sitting next to the camera on the arm of a long crane. They’re all facing forward, because they’re not allowed to look up” (13-14).

This early moment points to the disjointed nature of perspective. He’s trying to see himself, but he can only see himself from the angle of the camera. He never gets a full perspective of himself, and in the latter half of the passage we see his compulsion towards repression. He’s trying to avoid seeing what he can see and he’s taken back to the filming of The Molander Case, which he pretends was never shot. It’s because the movie, for all its seeming good intentions, is tainted by its context.

Before Pabst starts filming The Molander Case, he’s working on another project produced by, if I remember correctly, Leni Reifenstahl. It’s a difficult shoot. It turns out that the extras for the film are brought in from Maxglan—a concentration camp for Sinti and Roma people as a stop en route to Auschwitz. When filming, Pabst makes a comment about one of the extras, more or less, saying that he looked like he’d experienced the traumas of life and that’s what he wanted from the actors. When we get the reveal of where these extras are from, Pabst can’t stop ruminating on the comments he made, haunted by the implications.

So, it makes it harder to justify his change of heart when filming The Molander Case. Pabst is placed in an impossible position where he has to finish the film within three days, but the extras can no longer make it. To get a massive crowd shot, he brings in, presumably, inmates from a concentration camp. It’s complicated because it feels like maybe it’s meant to make a statement, especially with the interspersed shots of their suffering (or is it meant to suggest they are barbarous?!), but the move is exploitative. Sickening. Pabst’s assistant Franz is particularly affected; he sees his old pediatrician, one of the inmates. It’s the most obvious example of Pabst making art on the back of the most inhumane conditions possible and really casts a shadow on his project. The shroud of ambiguity is also there; I had the impression that maybe those extras were all killed in a fire immediately after the filming—I think there’s description of the sky blackening. It’s not definitive. Worse, Franz is devastated and when he tries to talk about it with Pabst, the director tells him he’s mistaken and that it was all soldiers who had been brought in.

The final turn of the book is even more complex. We see Pabst after the war, completely devastated and adrift after his film reels were mistakenly swapped for an identical bag of horseshoes. His wife is making a film that parallels them and shows, actually, a little bit of emotional nuance. Trude can’t forgive him for what he’s done—everything else, maybe, but not for bringing their son with them. She is haunted by his enthusiasm for joining the Hitler Youth and has long ago stopped loving Pabst. Pabst never saw his film again—but there’s a final twist. In the concluding chapter of the book, we return to Franz, now infirm and struggling with his memory (but how much of our memory is unintentional, the book asks, and how much of our memory is edited like a film?). It is revealed that Franz actually did have the reels returned to him from the horseshoe man but never came forward to give the film back to Pabst, despite his decrepitude. He also publicly denies the film ever existed before returning home and stashing it away in a closet. The fact that he refuses to acknowledge the film and operate in a sense of denial causes some ethical quandaries, especially because it’s not as though he destroyed it. He’s hoarding it, never to be seen.

The book is a challenge to our ethics. It makes us think about how complicit we are in the creation and enjoyment of art that’s built on the lives of others. It’s a consideration of our role within a bigger system. The ambiguous ethical position is frustrating, but important. For example, one of the chapters refers to how book critics no longer exist—only art appreciators. They are great at describing books and films, but they do not offer judgment, even positive judgment. You can’t call someone a good actor because that implies the existence of bad actors, or the possibility of a bad actor. Kehlmann clearly implies that we ought not be so passive, but also that the lines of involvement are often hard to grasp in the moment. There are three moments in the text where Franz experiences or remembers his pediatrician talking to him. The book ends on a reprise of their conversation: “Then the doctor would come. ‘Franzl, are we sick?’ His cool hand on my forehead. And then I thought, he’s not sick, Dr. Sämann, so why does he say we? Only I am sick” (331). This idea that we are all implicated together is what makes this novel so haunting, so perplexing.

One passage I see as critical is the description of the director as a profession. It encapsulates so much of how collective guilt functions. Pabst narrates:

“Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director” (64-65). 

The passage has a strange distancing effect. On the one hand, the director is seen as having created nothing. In that sense, perhaps Pabst is devoid of culpability. He has the plausible deniability that it’s other people causing the harm, not him. This would all happen without him. In a twisted vision of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, we see that all of the agents capable of independence except the director. The idea that artists can operate independently, but the director requires collaboration. He’s necessary and unnecessary at the same time, necessary only because of a collective illusion, a collective belief that a director is guiding all of them. It recalls the scene in which Pabst and Trude recognize that Hitler and Goebbels didn’t have the power: it was their groundskeeper. It’s hard not to see these positions as being mirror images of one another.

I’ll admit that, so far, this isn’t my favourite book in the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist, but it does give me a lot to think about, or perhaps more appropriately, more to be haunted by. There are some pretty clear parallels to our current situation when it comes to injustice, guilt, collective responsibility, and the awful origins of great art. It’s worth the read, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Happy reading!